This is an edited version of Chapter 4 from
the explosive 400-page exposé,

"The War on
Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11, 2001", by the leading British political
scientist and human rights activist Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, Director of
the Institute for Policy Research & Development in Brighton, UK. This
book was featured on Barry Zwicker’s MediaFile documentary series, ‘The
Great Deception: The War on Terrorism – An Alternative View?’, Vision
TV, Canada (February 4, 2002): "The most complete book I know of, at
this time, summarizing the relevant background and foreground
intersecting upon the events of September 11, 2001."

“What is
happening in the United States took me
by surprise. I anticipated that in the
aftermath of Sept. 11, there would be
an enormous hue and cry to find out
what went wrong. There has been no hue
and cry in the United States. No
recriminations, nothing even similar
to what happened after Pearl Harbor in
1941… The United States has drawn a
veil of silence over the issue of
intelligence failure.”

Wesley
Wark, Canadian Intelligence Expert and
Consultant to the Privy Council Office
of Canada on Intelligence Policy
(Globe & Mail, 18 December 2001)

“We’ve been focusing
on this perpetrator Osama bin Laden
for 3 years, and yet we didn’t see
this one coming,” said Vincent
Cannistraro, former chief of CIA
counter-terrorism operations. A U.S.
Air Force General described the attack
as “something we had never seen
before, something we had never even
thought of.” FBI Director Robert
Mueller further declared that “there
were no warning signs that I’m aware
of.” Senior FBI officials insisted
that in terms of intelligence warnings
received prior to 11th
September: “The notion of flying a
plane into a building or using it as a
bomb never came up.”[1]
According to this official version of
events, no one in the Bush
administration had the slightest idea
of the identities of those who
orchestrated the 11th
September attacks, the nature of their
plans, or their targets.

Contrary to these
prolific claims, there is compelling
evidence that the U.S. intelligence
community had extensive forewarning of
the 11th September attacks
on New York and Washington. Further
evidence suggests that the attacks
may, in fact, have been in the
interest of certain elements of the
Bush administration (see Chapter VII).

The Pentagon
commissioned an expert panel in 1993
to investigate the possibility of an
airplane being used to bomb national
landmarks. Retired Air Force Col. Doug
Menarchik, who organised the $150,000
study for the Defense Department’s
Office of Special Operations and
Low-Intensity Conflict, recalled: “It
was considered radical thinking, a
little too scary for the times. After
I left, it met a quiet death.” Other
participants have noted that the
decision not to publish detailed
scenarios issued to some extent from
fear that this may give terrorists
ideas. Nevertheless, a draft document
detailing the results of the
investigation was circulated through
the Pentagon, the Justice Department
and the Federal Emergency Management
Agency. Senior agency officials
decided against a public release.[2]

The veracity of the
Pentagon’s “radical thinking” was
confirmed in 1994 when there occurred
three attempted attacks on buildings
using airplanes. The first, in April
of that year, involved a Federal
Express flight engineer facing
dismissal.

Having boarded a
DC-10 as a passenger, he invaded the
cockpit, planning to crash the plane
into a company building in Memphis.
Fortunately, he was overpowered by the
crew.

The second attempt
occurred in September. A lone pilot
crashed a small plane into a tree on
the White House grounds, just short of
the President’s bedroom.

The third incident
occurred in December. An Air France
flight in Algiers was hijacked by
members of the Armed Islamic Group (GIA)—
who are linked to Al-Qaeda—aiming to
crash it into the Eiffel Tower. French
Special Forces stormed the plane on
the ground.[3]

Western intelligence
had been aware of plans for such
terrorist attacks on U.S. soil as
early as 1995. Both the Federal Bureau
of Investigation (FBI) and the Federal
Aviation Administration (FAA) had
detailed information about the
possible use of hijack/suicide attacks
by terrorists connected to Osama bin
Laden. The New York Times
reported that:

“In 1994, two
jetliners were hijacked by people who
wanted to crash them into buildings,
one of them by an Islamic militant
group. And the 2000 edition of the
FAA’s annual report on Criminal Acts
Against Aviation, published this year,
said that although Osama bin Laden ‘is
not known to have attacked civil
aviation, he has both the motivation
and the wherewithal to do so,’ adding,
‘Bin Laden’s anti-Western and
anti-American attitudes make him and
his followers a significant threat to
civil aviation, particularly to U.S.
civil aviation.’”[4]

Moreover, the U.S.
intelligence community was aware of
bin Laden’s specific intentions to use
hijacked civilian planes as weapons.
In this regard, the Chicago
Sun-Times reported that:

“The FBI had
advance indications of plans to hijack
U.S. airliners and use them as
weapons, but neither acted on them nor
distributed the intelligence to local
police agencies. From the moment of
the September 11th attacks,
high-ranking federal officials
insisted that the terrorists’ method
of operation surprised them. Many
stick to that story. Actually,
elements of the hijacking plan were
known to the FBI as early as 1995 and,
if coupled with current information,
might have uncovered the plot.”[5]

Details of these
advanced indications have been noted
in a report by the respected German
daily, Die Welt: “Western
secret services knew as far back as
1995 that suspected terror mastermind
Osama bin Laden planned to attack
civilian sites using commercial
passenger planes.” Quoting sources
“close to western intelligence
agencies,” the newspaper reported
that: “The plan was discovered in
January 1995 by Philippine police who
were investigating a possible attack
against Pope John Paul II on a visit
to Manila…

“They found details
of the plan in a computer seized in an
apartment used by three men who were
part of Bin Laden’s al‑Qaeda network.
It provided for 11 planes to be
exploded simultaneously by bombs
placed on board, but also in an
alternative form for several planes
flying to the United States to be
hijacked and flown into civilian
targets. Among targets mentioned was
the World Trade Center in New York,
which was destroyed in the September
11 terror attacks in the United States
that killed thousands.”

This plot
“re-surfaced during the trial in New
York in 1997 of Pakistani Ramsi Yousef,
the mastermind of the attack on the
World Trade Center in 1993... [The]
U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation
and CIA would have known about the
plan at the latest at this time.”[6]
As the Washington DC-based Public
Education Center (PEC) observes,
“Federal investigative sources have
confirmed that Murad”—who was “a close
confidant and right-hand man to Yousef,
who was convicted of crimes relating
to the 1993 bombing of the World Trade
Center”—“detailed an entire plot to
dive bomb aircraft in the headquarters
of the Central Intelligence Agency in
Langley, VA.” along with other U.S.
buildings. “Yousef independently
boasted of the plot to U.S. Secret
Service agent Brian Parr and FBI agent
Charles Stern on an extradition flight
from Pakistan to the United States in
February 1995,” continues the PEC
report. “The agents later testified to
that fact in court… [T]he plan
targeted not only the CIA but other
U.S. government buildings in
Washington, including the Pentagon.”[7]

Rafael M. Garcia
III, Chairman/CEO of the Mega Group of
Computer Companies in the Philippines,
who often works with the National
Bureau of Investigation (NBI) in his
field of expertise, was involved in
the intelligence operation that
uncovered Project Bojinka. Garcia was
responsible for the decoding of
Yousef’s computer. “This was how we
found out about the various plots
being hatched by the cell of Ramzi
Yousef. First, there was the plot to
assassinate Pope John Paul II,” he
observes. “Then, we discovered a
second, even more sinister plot:
Project Bojinka, or a Yugoslav term
for loud bang.

[8]
This was a plot to blow up 11 airlines
over the Pacific Ocean, all in a
48-hour period. The planes would have
come from Seoul, Hong Kong, Taipei,
Tokyo, Bangkok, Singapore, and Manila…

“Then we found
another document that discussed a
second alternative to crash the 11
planes into selected targets in the
United States instead of just blowing
them up in the air. These included the
CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia;
the World Trade Center in New York;
the Sears Tower in Chicago; the
TransAmerica Tower in San Francisco;
and the White House in Washington, DC…
I submitted my findings to NBI
officials, who most certainly turned
over the report (and the computer)
either to then Senior Superintendent
Avelino Razon of the PNP [the
Philippine National Police] or to Bob
Heafner of the FBI… I have since had
meetings with certain U.S. authorities
and they have confirmed to me that
indeed, many things were done in
response to my report.”

The
World Tribune similarly reports,
citing an intelligence source involved
in the Philippine operation,
that: “The hijacked aircraft were to
be crashed into structures in the
United States, including the World
Trade Center, the White House,
Pentagon, the Transamerica tower in
San Francisco and the Sears Tower in
Chicago.”

[10]
Paul Monk, Senior Fellow at the
Australian Thinking Skills Institute
and a Professor at the Australian
Defense University, cites
“confidential sources” in Manila and
Washington detailing that: “Project
Bojinka was an AQ [Al-Qaeda] plan to
hijack eleven airliners
simultaneously, exploding many of them
at various places over the Pacific,
but flying at least two of them into
major federal government buildings in
the United States. The flights to be
hijacked were specified. They were all
United Airlines, Northwest Airlines
and Delta flights…

“The plan has been
masterminded by one Ramzi Yousef, who
was arrested in Islamabad in the wake
of Murad’s interrogation. Both Murad
and Yousef were extradited to the
United States, tried and convicted for
complicity in the 1993 attack on the
WTC. The date of Yousef’s conviction
was 11 September 1996. From that
point, given the fascination
terrorists have with anniversaries, 11
September should surely have become a
watch date.”

Detailed elaboration
on this matter is provided by the
Washington DC-based media watch group,
Accuracy In Media (AIM). AIM has
harshly criticised the media for
largely ignoring the U.S. intelligence
community’s advanced knowledge of
Project Bojinka:

“In 1995, the
CIA and the FBI learned that Osama bin
Laden was planning to hijack U.S.
airliners and use them as bombs to
attack important targets in the U.S.
This scheme was called Project Bojinka.
It was discovered in the Philippines,
where authorities arrested two of bin
Laden’s agents, Ramzi Yousef and Abdul
Hakim Murad. They were involved in
planting a bomb on a Philippine
airliner. Project Bojinka, which
Philippine authorities found outlined
on Abdul Murad’s laptop, called for
planting bombs on eleven U.S.
airliners and hijacking others and
crashing them into targets like the
CIA building…

It required
aviators like Japan’s kamikaze pilots
who were willing to commit suicide.
Bin Laden had no such pilots in 1995,
but he set out to train young fanatics
willing to die for him to fly
airliners. Abdul Murad, whose laptop
had revealed the plan, admitted that
he was being trained for a suicide
mission. Bin Laden began training
pilots in Afghanistan with the help of
an Afghan pilot and a Pakistani
general.

Project Bojinka was
known to the CIA and the FBI. It was
described in court documents in the
trial in New York of Ramzi Yousef and
Abdul Murad for their participation in
the bombing of the World Trade Center
in 1993. Since the CIA had been
mentioned as one of the targets in
Project Bojinka, it should have had an
especially strong interest in any
evidence that bin Laden was preparing
to carry it out. The most obvious
indicator, and one that should have
been watched most carefully, was the
recruitment of young, dedicated
followers to learn to fly American
airliners. That would require keeping
a close watch on flight schools where
that training is given.”[12]

And indeed, the
surveillance of flight schools is
exactly what subsequently occurred,
indicating that the threat posed by
Project Bojinka was not
dismissed—rather, it was taken
seriously and used as the basis for
intensive intelligence gathering. As
Garcia testifies, in meetings with
“certain U.S. authorities… they have
confirmed to me that indeed, many
things were done in response” to the
findings of Project Bojinka.

[13]
The Washington Post, noting the
plans outlined in Project Bojinka,
reported that: “Since 1996, the FBI
had been developing evidence that
international terrorists were using
flight schools to learn to fly jumbo
jets.” This evidence began to
accumulate shortly after the FBI
learned of Project Bojinka. “A foiled
plot in Manila to blow up U.S.
airliners and later court testimony by
an associate of bin Laden had touched
off FBI inquiries at several schools,
officials say.”[14]
It should be noted that this report
indicates that Al-Qaeda’s plans for
Project Bojinka were considered by
U.S. intelligence to be a credible
threat, and thus “touched off” further
investigations.

Early in the same
year, U.S. officials had identified
crop-dusters and suicide flights as
potential terrorist weapons. Elaborate
steps were adopted to prevent an
attack from the air during the Summer
Olympic Games in Atlanta. U.S.
aircraft were deployed to intercept
suspicious aircraft in the skies over
Olympic venues, while agents monitored
crop-duster flights within hundreds of
miles of downtown Atlanta. According
to Woody Johnson, head of the FBI’s
Atlanta office at the time, law
enforcement agents fanned out to
regional airports throughout northern
Georgia “to make sure nobody hijacked
a small aircraft and tried to attack
one of the venues.” From 6th
July to 11th August, when
the Games ended, the FAA had banned
all aviation within a one-mile radius
of the Olympic Village where athletes
were resident. Aircraft were also
ordered to stay at least three miles
away from other sites, beginning three
hours before each event until three
hours after each event ended.

[15]
These extensive measures in 1996, in
response to the general threat of a
possible terrorist attack, should be
duly noted—there is a stark contrast
between these measures and the almost
total lack of preventive measures in
response to warnings of the 11th
September attacks.

By 1999, the Federal
Aviation Administration’s annual
report on Criminal Acts Against
Aviation noted the threat posed by
bin Laden, recalling that a radical
Muslim leader living in British exile
had warned in August 1998 that
bin Laden “would bring down an
airliner, or hijack an airliner to
humiliate the United States.” The 2000
edition of the annual report,
published early in 2001, reiterated
concerns that although bin Laden “is
not known to have attacked civil
aviation, he has both the motivation
and the wherewithal to do so… Bin
Laden’s anti-Western and anti-American
attitudes make him and his followers a
significant threat to civil aviation,
particularly to U.S. civil aviation.”[16]

Meanwhile, the
surveillance of Al-Qaeda operatives on
U.S. soil continued. Between 2000 and
2001, the CIA had made the FBI aware
of the names of about 100 suspected
members of bin Laden’s terrorist
network thought to be headed to, or
already in, the United States. A 23rd
August 2001 cable specifically
referred to Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq
Alhazmi, who were allegedly aboard the
hijacked airplane that crashed into
the Pentagon.[17]

Six months before 11th
September, U.S. agencies became aware
through authoritative intelligence
warnings that bin Laden was planning
to implement Project Bojinka soon.
Three months later, these warnings
were repeated. The warnings were,
again, not dismissed. On the contrary,
the U.S. intelligence community took
the reports very seriously.
Newsbytes, an online division of
the Washington Post, reported
in mid-September that:

“U.S. and Israeli
intelligence agencies received warning
signals at least three months ago that
Middle Eastern terrorists were
planning to hijack commercial aircraft
to use as weapons to attack important
symbols of American and Israeli
culture, according to a story in
Germany’s daily Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ).

The FAZ, quoting
unnamed German intelligence sources,
said that the Echelon spy network was
being used to collect information
about the terrorist threats, and that
U.K. intelligence services apparently
also had advance warning. The FAZ, one
of Germany’s most respected dailies,
said that even as far back as six
months ago western and near-east press
services were receiving information
that such attacks were being planned.
Within the American intelligence
community, the warnings were taken
seriously and surveillance
intensified, the FAZ said.”

The last
comment—“Within the American
intelligence community, the warnings
were taken seriously”—is crucial. It
clearly indicates that in response to
the ECHELON warnings, the entire U.S.
intelligence community—all U.S.
intelligence agencies—were on alert
for a Project Bojinka-style attack,
and consequently intensified
surveillance. The New Yorker
further reports that according to
Richard A. Clarke, U.S. National
Coordinator for Counterterrorism in
the White House, about ten weeks
before 11th September, the
U.S. intelligence community was
convinced that a terrorist attack by
Al-Qaeda on U.S. soil was imminent.
Seven to eight weeks prior to the 11th
September attacks, all internal U.S.
security agencies were warned of an
impending Al-Qaeda attack against the
Untied States that would likely occur
in several weeks time. This warning
coincided with the second ECHELON
warning cited before:

“Meanwhile,
intelligence had been streaming in
concerning a likely Al Qaeda attack.
‘It all came together in the third
week in June,’ Clarke said. ‘The
C.I.A.’s view was that a major
terrorist attack was coming in the
next several weeks.’ On July 5th,
Clarke summoned all the domestic
security agencies—the Federal Aviation
Administration, the Coast Guard,
Customs, the Immigration and
Naturalization Service, and the F.B.I.—and
told them to increase their security
in light of an impending attack.”

It is apparent then
that all U.S. intelligence agencies
were fully expecting an impending
attack by Al-Qaeda by the beginning of
July 2001, and moreover that the U.S.
intelligence community was aware that
“terrorists were planning to hijack
commercial aircraft to use as weapons
to attack important symbols of
American… culture.” In other words,
the U.S. intelligence community was
anticipating a Project Bojinka-style
attack. Among the buildings identified
as “symbolic of American culture” in
Al-Qaeda’s Project Bojinka plans,
known by U.S. intelligence, was the
World Trade Center. That the WTC was
an extremely likely target is further
clear from the fact that operatives
linked to Osama bin Laden had
previously targeted the Twin Towers in
a failed bombing attempt. As a
consequence, the entire domestic
intelligence and security apparatus
seems to have been alerted to increase
relevant security and surveillance.

Warnings of the
impending attack continued to be
received thereafter. Approximately 4
weeks prior to 11th
September, the CIA received specific
information of an attack on U.S. soil.
The Associated Press reports that:
“Officials also said the CIA had
developed general information a month
before the attacks that heightened
concerns that bin Laden and his
followers were increasingly determined
to strike on U.S. soil.” A CIA
official affirmed that: “There was
something specific in early August
that said to us that he was determined
in striking on U.S. soil.” AP
elaborates that: “The information
prompted the CIA to issue a warning to
federal agencies.”

It was further
revealed by a United Press
International (UPI) report by U.S.
terrorism correspondent Richard Sale
on ECHELON’s monitoring of bin Laden
and other terrorist groups that:

“The targets of
Echelon center on the penetration of
the major components of most of the
world’s telephone and
telecommunications systems. This could
cover conversations NSA targets. Also
included are all the telexes carried
over the world’s telecommunications
networks, along with financial
dealings: money transfers, airline
destinations, stock information, data
on demonstrations or international
conferences, and much more.”

ECHELON’s
effectiveness against bin Laden’s
network was further revealed in
relation to a case against him in a
U.S. District Court in Manhattan,
illustrating that the National
Security Agency was able to penetrate
bin Laden’s most secure
communications. The case, Sale noted,
“is based mainly on National Security
Agency intercepts of phone calls
between bin Laden and his operatives
around the world—Afghanistan to
London, from Kenya to the United
States.”

The technology had
been used since at least 1995. Ben
Venzke, Director of Intelligence and
Special Projects for iDefense, a
Virginia information warfare firm, is
also quoted: “Since Bin Laden started
to encrypt certain calls in 1995, why
would they now be part of a court
record? ‘Codes were broken,’ U.S.
officials said, and Venzke added that
‘you don’t use your highest levels of
secure communications all the time.
It’s too burdensome and it exposes it
to other types of exploitation..’” The
UPI report clarifies that much of the
evidence in the case had been obtained
in ECHELON intercepts subsequent to
the 1998 bombings of U.S. embassies in
East Africa.[21]
Given that U.S. officials “believe the
planning for the Sept. 11 attacks
probably began two years ago,”
information on preparations for the
attacks should have been available to,
and picked up by, ECHELON.

Confirmation that
U.S. intelligence had been
successfully monitoring Al-Qaeda’s
communications right through to the
aftermath of 11th September
came from Utah Senator Orrin Hatch, a
conservative Republican with wide
contacts in the national security
establishment. On the day of the
attacks, Hatch stated that the U.S.
government had been monitoring Osama
bin Laden’s communications
electronically, and had thus
intercepted two bin Laden aides
celebrating the attacks: “They have an
intercept of some information that
included people associated with bin
Laden who acknowledged a couple of
targets were hit.”

ABC News
further reported that shortly before
11th September, the U.S.
National Security Agency intercepted
“multiple phone calls from Abu
Zubaida, bin Laden’s chief of
operations, to the United States.” The
information contained in these
intercepted phone calls has not been
disclosed.

Given that ECHELON
was monitoring Osama bin Laden and Al‑Qaeda,
and even breaking their secure codes,
the implications are alarming. As
Canadian social philosopher Professor
John McMurtry of Guelph University,
Ontario, has noted in this connection:

“The pervasive
Echelon surveillance apparatus and the
most sophisticated intelligence
machinery ever built is unlikely not
to have eavesdropped on some of the
very complicated organisation and
plans across states and boundaries for
the multi-site hijacking of planes
from major security structures across
the U.S.—especially since the suicide
pilots were trained as pilots in the
U.S., and the World Trade Centre had
already been bombed in 1993 by Afghan
ex-allies of the CIA. Since the prime
suspect, Osama bin Laden, is himself
an ex-CIA operative in Afghanistan,
and his moves presumably under the
intensest scrutiny for past successful
terrorist attacks on two U.S.
embassies in 1998, one has to reflect
on the connections.”

It is worth noting
here that around the time of the first
ECHELON warnings, near the end of June
2001, Airjet Airline World News also
issued a warning, specifying Project
Bojinka: “During the trial a Secret
Service agent testified that Yousef
boasted during his extradition flight
to New York that he would have blown
up several jumbo jets within a few
weeks if his plan had not been
discovered. The government said the
defendants even devised a name for
their airline terror plot named,
‘Project Bojinka’… The airlines are at
risk—They need to take all appropriate
measures and counter-measures to
ensure the safety of their
passengers.”

[26]
The White House National Coordinator
for Counterterrorism, Richard Clarke,
had also given direct warning to the
Federal Aviation Administration (FAA)
to increase security measures in light
of an impending terrorist attack in
July 2001.[27]
The FAA refused to take such measures.

Former Federal Air
Safety Inspector Rodney Stich, who has
50 years of experience in aviation and
air safety, had warned the FAA about
the danger of skyjacking, specifically
highlighting the fact that cockpit
doors weren’t secure, and further that
pilots should be allowed to carry
basic weapons. The FAA refused to
implement his suggestions, and when it
became apparent the threat was real,
they blocked efforts to arm pilots, or
to place air marshals on planes, among
other security measures. In an
extensive study of the subject, Stich
observes that:

“Federal
inspectors… had years earlier reported
the hijacking threat and the simple
inexpensive measures to prevent
hijackers from taking control of the
aircraft. Numerous fatal hijackings
further proved the need for urgent
preventative measures. Instead of
taking the legally required corrective
actions, arrogant and corrupt FAA
management personnel destroyed
official reports of the dangers and
the need for corrective actions;
warned air safety inspectors not to
submit reports that would make the
office look bad when there is a crash
related to the known problems;
threatened inspectors who took
corrective actions or continued to
make reports—even though crashes from
these uncorrected safety problems
continued to occur.”

The Los Angeles
Times corroborates this
assessment: “Federal bureaucracy and
airline lobbying slowed and weakened a
set of safety improvements recommended
by a presidential commission—including
one that a top airline industry
official now says might have prevented
the Sept. 11 terror attacks…

“The White House
Commission on Aviation Safety and
Security, created in 1996 after TWA
Flight 800 crashed off Long Island,
N.Y., recommended 31 steps that it
said were urgently needed to provide a
multilayered security system at the
nation's airports... The Federal
Aviation Administration expressed
support for the proposals, which
ranged from security inspections at
airports to tighter screening of mail
parcels, and the Clinton
administration vowed to rigorously
monitor the changes. But by Sept. 11,
most of the proposals had been watered
down by industry lobbying or were
bogged down in bureaucracy, a Times
review found.”

The U.S. government
thus bears direct responsibility for
this state of affairs, by consistently
failing to comply with its avowed
responsibility to “rigorously monitor”
and enforce the required changes.
Larry Klayman, Chairman and General
Counsel of Judicial Watch, the
Washington-based legal watchdog,
comments that: “It is now
apparent—given the near total lack of
security at U.S. airports and
elsewhere—that the U.S. government has
not been forthright with the American
people…

“During the last
eight years of scandal during the
Clinton administration, and the first
eight months of the Bush
Administration, reports this morning
confirm that little to nothing was
done to secure our nation’s airports
and transportation systems as a
whole—despite warnings. Instead,
cosmetic reform of education, social
security, taxes, and other less
important issues were given
precedence. In addition, the American
people were led to believe that
appropriate anti-terrorist counter
measures were being taken. Instead of
telling the truth so the problems
could be addressed, politicians
painted a rosy picture in order to be
elected and re-elected.”

This is clearly more
than a case of incompetence. This
systematic inaction, despite
escalating warnings of a terrorist
threat to the U.S. from the air,
indicates wilful and reckless
negligence of the highest order on the
part of the U.S. government, rooted in
sheer indifference to the potential
loss in American lives.

It is against this
backdrop that the multiple
intelligence warnings of an impending
terrorist act by bin Laden’s
operatives should be assessed.
Clearly, on the basis of the 1995
revelations about Project Bojinka,
coupled with the authoritative
warnings in 2001 from America’s own
ECHELON network among others, “the
American intelligence community” was
aware that bin Laden was planning
imminent attacks on U.S. soil through
the hijacking of civilian airliners to
be used as bombs against key buildings
“symbolic of American culture.” Among
the buildings in Washington and New
York known to be on bin Laden’s list
of targets was the World Trade Centre.

Project Bojinka, in
other words, was underway. U.S.
intelligence agencies subsequently
intensified their surveillance, and in
doing so began tracking suspected
terrorists. This indicates that the
U.S. intelligence community had
intensified surveillance by its
various agencies in direct response to
fears of a Project Bojinka-style
attack on U.S. soil, orchestrated by
Osama bin Laden.

It is appropriate
then to consider in more detail the
findings of this surveillance.
WorldNetDaily, the Internet news
service of the U.S.-based non-profit
Western Journalism Center, reports
some pertinent revelations in this
respect:

“The FBI and other
federal law enforcement agencies also
knew that two of the hijackers were in
the country, according to the Los
Angeles Times. They were on a
terrorist watch list. But the airlines
were not notified… The FBI had several
terrorists under surveillance,
according to the Oct. 1 issue of
Newsweek. They intercepted
communications just prior to Sept. 11
that suggested something very big was
about to happen… Still, there were
more clues. Zacarias Moussaoui was
arrested after flight trainers tipped
off the feds that he wanted to learn
how to fly a 747 but wasn’t interested
in takeoffs or landings. Zacarias was
traveling on a French passport. When
contacted, the French government
reported that he was a suspected
terrorist [linked to Osama Bin
Laden].”[31]

Reuters reported in
relation to Zacarias that: “The FBI
arrested an Islamic militant in Boston
last month and received French
intelligence reports linking him to
Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden
but apparently did not act on them,” a
French radio station said on Thursday…

“Europe 1 radio
reported that U.S. police arrested a
man with dual French and Algerian
nationality who had several passports,
technical information on Boeing
aircraft and flight manuals. The man
had been taking flying lessons, it
added. Asked for information by the
Federal Bureau of Investigation,
French security services provided a
dossier clearly identifying him as an
Islamic militant working with bin
Laden.”[32]

At the time of his
arrest, Zacarias had been in
possession of technical information on
Boeing aircraft and flight manuals. It
was on 26th August that the
FBI headquarters was informed by
French intelligence that Zacarias had
ties to Al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
Despite the confirmation of his
involvement in bin Laden’s terrorist
network, a special counterterrorism
panel of the FBI and CIA reviewed the
information against him, but concluded
there was insufficient evidence that
he represented a threat. The Minnesota
flight school, Pan Am International
Flight Academy, where Zacarias had
been training, also warned the FBI in
no uncertain terms.

As the Minneapolis
Star-Tribune reported,
“Moussaoui raised suspicions at the
Pan Am International Flight Academy in
Egan [Minnesota]” when he attended the
Academy in August 2001 to learn how to
fly jumbo jets. He “first raised
eyebrows when, during a simple
introductory exchange, he said he was
from France, but then didn’t seem to
understand when the instructor spoke
French to him… Moussaoui then became
belligerent and evasive about his
background… In addition, he seemed
inept in basic flying procedures,
while seeking expensive training on an
advanced commercial jet simulator.”

Even the flight
school’s own employees “began
whispering that he could be a
hijacker.” Director of Operations at
the Academy John Rosengren recounts
how Zacarias’ instructor was
“concerned and wondered why someone
who was not a pilot and had so little
experience was trying to pack so much
training into such a short time… ‘The
more he was able to talk to him, the
more he decided he was not pilot
material… There was discussion about
how much fuel was on board a 747-400
and how much damage that could cause
if it hit anything.’”

[34]
So the instructor contacted the FBI,
as the San Francisco Chronicle
reported:

“An instructor at
a Minnesota flight school warned the
FBI in August of his suspicion that a
student who was later identified as a
part of Osama bin Laden’s terror
network might be planning to use a
commercial plane loaded with fuel as a
weapon, a member of Congress and other
officials said yesterday. The
officials, who were briefed by the
school, said the instructor warned the
FBI in urgent tones about the
terrorist threat posed by the student,
Zacarias Moussaoui.

According to U.S.
Representative James L. Oberstar of
Minnesota, the instructor called the
bureau several times to find someone
in authority who seemed willing to act
on the information. His warnings could
not have been more blunt. Oberstar
noted that: ‘He told them, ‘Do you
realize that a 747 loaded with fuel
can be used as a bomb?’

Congressional
officials said the account by the
school, the Pan Am International
Flight Academy in Eagan, outside
Minneapolis, raised new questions
about why the FBI and other agencies
did not prevent the hijackings… [The
flight instructor] was a former
military pilot who grew suspicious
after encounters in which Moussaoui
was belligerent and evasive about his
background and because he was so
adamant about learning to fly a 747
jumbo jet despite his clear
incompetence as a pilot. Moussaoui,
33, was arrested in August on
immigration charges. But despite the
urging of the school and federal
agents in Minnesota and despite a
warning from the French that Moussaoui
was linked to Muslim extremists, FBI
headquarters resisted opening a
broader investigation until after
Sept. 11.”

Indeed, the U.S.
government actively prevented a
further investigation from being
conducted. Local FBI investigators in
Minneapolis had immediately viewed
Zacarias as a terrorist suspect and
sought authorisation for a special
counterintelligence surveillance
warrant in order to search the hard
drive of his home computer. The
government’s Justice Department plus
top FBI officials blocked an FBI
request for a national security
warrant to search Zacarias’ computer,
claiming that FBI agents lacked
sufficient information to meet the
legal requirements to justify the
warrant. The block remained in place
even after the notification from
French intelligence that Zacarias was
linked to bin Laden.[36]

According to ABC
News, however, at the time the Justice
Department justified the refusal of a
warrant by claiming that there was
insufficient evidence connecting
Zacarias to any known terrorist group:
“Moussaoui was taken into custody on
August 16, but to the outrage of FBI
agents in the field, headquarters was
slow to react and said he could not be
connected to any known terror group.”

[37]
This was despite the information from
French intelligence demonstrating the
latter’s links to Osama bin Laden and
Al-Qaeda. While some law enforcement
officials justify the block as a legal
necessity, others strongly disagree
that such justification has any real
basis in law. “That decision is being
questioned by some FISA experts, who
say it’s possible a warrant would have
been granted,” reported Greg Gordon.
“The special court that reviews FISA
requests has approved more than 12,000
Justice Department applications for
covert search warrants and wiretaps
and rejected only one since the act
was passed in 1978, according to
government reports.”[38]
MS-NBC has similarly reported that:

“…other law
enforcement officials are equally
insistent that a more aggressive probe
of Moussaoui—when combined with other
intelligence in the possession of U.S.
agencies—might have yielded sufficient
clues about the impending plot. ‘The
question being asked here is if they
put two and two together, they could
have gotten a lot more information
about the guy—if not stopped the
hijacking,’ said one investigator.”

The U.S. response to
Mohamed Atta, the alleged lead
hijacker, was even more extraordinary.
The German public TV channel, ARD,
reported on 23rd November,
2001, that Mohamed Atta was subject to
telephone monitoring by the Egyptian
secret service. The latter had found
that Atta had made at least one recent
visit to Afghanistan from his home in
Hamburg, Germany. The FBI had also
been monitoring Atta’s movements for
several months in 2000, when he
traveled several times from Hamburg to
Frankfurt and bought large quantities
of chemicals potentially usable in
making explosives. Atta’s name had
also been mentioned in a Hamburg phone
call between Islamic fundamentalists
monitored by the German police in
1999.

In January 2001,
Atta was permitted reentry into the
United States after a trip to Germany,
despite being in violation of his visa
status. He had landed in Miami on 10th
January on a flight from Madrid on a
tourist visa—yet he
had told immigration inspectors that
he was taking flying lessons in the
U.S., for which an M-1 student visa is
strictly required. Jeanne Butterfield,
Executive Director of the American
Immigration Lawyers Association,
points out that: “Nine times out of
10, they would have told him to go
back and file [for that status]
overseas. You’re not supposed to come
in as a visitor for pleasure and go to
work or school.”

PBS’ Frontlines also
takes note of “The failure of the INS
to stop the attack’s ringleader,
Mohamed Atta, from entering the U.S.
three times on a tourist visa in 2001,
even though officials knew the visa
had expired in 2000 and Atta had
violated its terms by taking flight
lessons.”

This failure should
be evaluated in context with the fact
that Atta had been under FBI
surveillance for stockpiling
bomb-making materials. Furthermore,
Canadian TV reported that Atta had
already been implicated in a terrorist
bombing in Israel, with the
information passed on to the United
States before he was first issued his
tourist visa.

Yet despite these
blatant terrorist connections, Atta
was still allowed into the United
States freely, and made repeated trips
to Europe, each time returning to the
U.S., and being admitted by U.S.
customs and immigration without
obstruction—not
because visa regulations were lax, but
because they were willfully violated.
The London Observer notes in
surprise that Atta:

“… was under
surveillance between January and May
last year after he was reportedly
observed buying large quantities of
chemicals in Frankfurt, apparently for
the production of explosives and for
biological warfare… The U.S. agents
reported to have trailed Atta are said
to have failed to inform the German
authorities about their investigation.
The disclosure that Atta was being
trailed by police long before 11
September raises the question why the
attacks could not have been prevented
with the man’s arrest.”

Atta also appears to
have been under continual surveillance
by the FBI. He was among the suspected
terrorists linked to bin Laden
training at U.S. flight schools, which
the FBI had already known about for
years. As the BBC observed: “The
evidence... reinforces concerns that
the international intelligence
community may have known more about
Atta before September 11 than was
previously thought, but had failed to
act.”

There was a similar
lack of response in relation to other
suspected terrorists under U.S.
surveillance. Human Events
reported that:

“The FBI and other
federal law enforcement agencies knew
about the presence of at least two of
the terrorists in the United States,
but failed to get the information to
airlines. Khalid Al-Midhar and Nawaq
Alhamzi, who were on Flight 77 that
hit the Pentagon, were already on the
so-called watch list. But federal
officials failed to notify airline
officials who might have been able to
stop at least one of the terror
attacks, reports the Los Angeles
Times.”

The CIA and FBI knew
three weeks before the attacks that
these two hijackers, including one
with a link to the bombing of the U.S.
destroyer Cole in October 2000, were
in the United States. Yet despite
being on a terrorism watch list, which
details individuals banned from
entering the country due to their
apparent links to terrorist
activities, they were neither barred
from entry into the U.S. nor
apprehended later. The Washington
Post has further pointed out,
incredulously, that more than 50
people were probably involved in
preparations for the operation within
the U.S.—without
agencies doing anything about it:

“The scattered
details that have emerged about the
plot put this failure in stark relief:
More than 50 people were likely
involved, Justice Department officials
have said, and the plot required
extensive communications and planning
to pull off. The group's size—not to
mention the complexity of its
endeavor—should have offered many
opportunities for intelligence
infiltration. Yet the conspirators
proceeded unmolested. What is striking
is how safe these people apparently
felt, how unthreatened by law
enforcement. Some of the terrorists
were here for long periods. They left
and entered the country unimpeded.
Some were reportedly on the so-called
‘watch list,’ a government catalogue
of people who ostensibly are not
permitted to enter the country. Yet
this apparently caused them no
problems.”

Further
corroborative revelations have
surfaced, indicating the extent of the
FBI’s failure to act. According to
reports in Newsweek, the
Washington Post and the New
York Times, after 11th
September U.S. military officials gave
the FBI information “suggesting that
five of the alleged hijackers received
training in the 1990s at secure U.S.
military installations.”[49]Newsweek has further elaborated
that U.S. military training of foreign
students occurs as a matter of
routine, with the authorisation—and
payment—of respective governments,
clarifying in particular that with
respect to training of Saudi pilots,
“Training is paid for by Saudi
Arabia.” The hijackers, we should
note, were almost exclusively Saudi;
15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis,
mostly from wealthy families:

“U.S. military
sources have given the FBI information
that suggests five of the alleged
hijackers of the planes that were used
in Tuesday’s terror attacks received
training at secure U.S. military
installations in the 1990s. Another
of the alleged hijackers may have been
trained in strategy and tactics at the
Air War College in Montgomery, Ala.,
said another high-ranking Pentagon
official. The fifth man may have
received language instruction at
Lackland Air Force Base in San
Antonio, Tex. Both were former Saudi Air Force
pilots who had come to the United
States, according to the Pentagon
source… NEWSWEEK visited the base
early Saturday morning, where military
police confirmed that the address
housed foreign military flight
trainees… It is not unusual for
foreign nationals to train at U.S.
military facilities. A former Navy
pilot told NEWSWEEK that during his
years on the base, ‘we always, always,
always trained other countries’
pilots. When I was there two decades
ago, it was Iranians. The shah was in
power. Whoever the country du jour is,
that’s whose pilots we train.’

Candidates begin with ‘an officer’s
equivalent of boot camp,’ he said.
‘Then they would put them through
flight training.’ The U.S. has a
long-standing agreement with
Saudi Arabia—a key ally
in the 1990-91 gulf war—to train
pilots for its National Guard.
Candidates are trained in air combat
on several Army and Navy bases.
Training is paid for by Saudi Arabia.”

Knight Ridder
news service provided more specific
details of the findings. Mohamed Atta
had attended International Officers
School at Maxwell Air Force Base in
Montgomery, Alabama; Abdulaziz Alomari
had attended Aerospace Medical School
at Brooks Air Force base in Texas; and
Saeed Alghamdi had been to the Defense
Language Institute in Monterey,
California.

The U.S. government
has attempted to deny the charges
despite the name matches, alleging the
existence of biographical
discrepancies: “Officials stressed
that the name matches may not
necessarily mean the students were the
hijackers because of discrepancies in
ages and other personal data.” But
measures appear to have been taken to
block public scrutiny of these alleged
discrepancies. On 16th
September, news reports asserted that:
“Officials would not release ages,
country of origin or any other
specific details of the three
individuals.” This situation seems to
have continued up to the time of
writing.

Even Senate
inquiries into the matter have been
studiously ignored by government law
enforcement officials, who when
pressed, have been unable to deny that
the hijackers were training at secure
U.S. military installations. When
Newsweek reported that three of
the hijackers were trained at the
secure Pensacola Naval Station in
Florida, Senator Bill Nelson faxed
Attorney General John Ashcroft
demanding to know if it was true.

When queried by
investigative journalist Daniel
Hopsicker about Ashcroft’s reply, a
spokesman for Senator Nelson
explained: “In the wake of those
reports we asked about the Pensacola
Naval Air Station but we never got a
definitive answer from the Justice
Department. So we asked the FBI for an
answer ‘if and when’ they could
provide us one. Their response to date
has been that they are trying to sort
through something complicated and
difficult.”

Hopsicker also
queried a major in the U.S. Air
Force’s Public Affairs Office who “was
familiar with the question,” and who,
unlike U.S. law enforcement, believed
that the matter was clear-cut. She
explained the Air Force’s official
‘denial’ as follows: “Biographically,
they’re not the same people. Some of
the ages are 20 years off.” But when
questioned to illustrate the specific
discrepancy, she was forced to admit
there was none. Hopsicker relates
that: “‘Some’ of the ages? We told her
we were only interested in Atta. Was
she saying that the age of the Mohamed
Atta who attended the Air Force's
International Officer’s School at
Maxwell Air Force Base was different
from the terrorist Atta’s age as
reported? Um, er, no, the major
admitted.” Hopsicker asked if he could
contact the other alleged “Mohamed
Atta” who is supposed to have been
confused with the hijacker, who had
trained at the International Officer’s
School at Maxwell Air Force Base, to
confirm that they were, in fact, two
different individuals. The major
declined without explanation, stating
that she did not “think you’re going
to get that information.”

By mid-October 2001,
the FBI’s investigations into these
matters were being wrapped up,
although no specific answers to this
issue, palatable enough to be released
to the public, were found. “On Oct.
10, FBI Agents were ordered to curtail
their investigation of the Sept. 11
attack in an order describing the
investigation of the terrorist
hijackings as ‘the most exhaustive in
its history,’” reported Hopsicker.
“‘The investigative staff has to be
made to understand that we’re not
trying to solve a crime now,’ said one
law enforcement official…

“The order was said
to have met with resistance from FBI
agents who believed that continued
surveillance of suspects might have
turned up critical evidence to prove
who orchestrated the attacks on the
World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
Officials said FBI Director Robert
Mueller, who was sworn in last month,
believed that his agents had a broad
understanding of the events of
Sept. 11. It was now time to move on.”

The simple question
brought up by these revelations is,
how did terrorists receive clearance
for training at secure U.S. military
and intelligence facilities, and for
what purpose?

As early as three
days after the 11th
September attacks, FBI Director Robert
S. Mueller III claimed that these
findings were new and had not been
known by the FBI previously. The
Washington Post noted that he had:
“described reports that several of the
hijackers had received flight training
in the United States as ‘news, quite
obviously,’ adding, ‘If we had
understood that to be the case, we
would have—perhaps one could have
averted this.’”[52]
But astonishingly, the same Post
article illustrated that Mueller had
lied about the FBI’s lack of
knowledge. The Post reported in
the same article that, contrary to the
FBI Director’s initial testimony, the
FBI had in fact known for several
years that terrorists were training at
U.S. flight schools—yet, absolutely
nothing had been done about it:

“Federal
authorities have been aware for years
that suspected terrorists with ties to
Osama bin Laden were receiving flight
training at schools in the United
States and abroad, according to
interviews and court testimony… A
senior government official yesterday
acknowledged law enforcement officials
were aware that fewer than a dozen
people with links to bin Laden had
attended U.S. flight schools.”[53]

A report for the
Online Journal by Daniel Hopsicker,
former Executive Producer of a
business news show airing
internationally on NBC, confirms that:

“Authorities are
probing the European business
associations of a Venice flight school
owner, whose school at the Venice
airport trained the nucleus of foreign
national terrorist pilots, looking for
possible links to international
organized crime groups… Three of the
airliners involved in the September 11
terrorist attack—two in Manhattan, and
one wrested to the ground over
Pennsylvania—were piloted by
terrorists who had trained at two
flight schools at the Venice, Florida
airport.”

“Almost all of the
terrorist pilots,” Hopsicker reports,
“received their initial training in
Venice,” at either of two flight
schools owned respectively by Arne
Kruithof and Rudi Dekkers. “Together,
these two schools trained the core
cadre of foreign terrorist pilots.”
But U.S. intelligence allowed this
training to continue unimpeded, even
amidst escalating warnings of a
terrorist attack on U.S. soil through
the use of hijacked civilian
airplanes, and despite having
monitored the terrorists for several
years. “The FBI was swarming Huffman
Aviation by 2 a.m., just 18 hours
following the attack. They removed
student files from two schools at the
Venice airport: Huffman Aviation and
the Florida Flight Training Center
just down the street,” owned by the
above two individuals.

Indeed, it appears
that the reason the FBI was able to
move so quickly is that “federal
authorities have been aware for years
that suspected terrorists with ties to
Osama bin Laden were receiving flight
training at schools in the United
States.” Hopsicker further observes:

“Experts have been
wondering how a conspiracy of such
size and duration could have gone
unnoticed by U.S. intelligence
agencies and law enforcement. At least
15 of the far-flung network of
terrorist pilots got their money from
the same (so far-unnamed) source.
While in the Venice area last year,
the terrorist suspects opened checking
accounts during the summer.

We called someone
who used to work at something like the
CIA. ‘How could the agency not have
known about 15 foreign pilots all paid
from one source?’ He chose his words
carefully. ‘I would assume that they
did know. It would seem almost
impossible for them not to.’”

Hopsicker also
points out that the suspicious
background and activities of Rudi
Dekkers, the owner of Huffman Aviation
where most of the terrorists who went
on to implement the 11th
September attacks were trained, are
worthy of a further intelligence
inquiry. There are a number of glaring
anomalies noted by Hopsicker, a few of
which are mentioned here. Dekkers’
chronology of his flight training of
hijackers Atta and Al-Shehhi, for
instance, directly contradicts the
testimony of other flight instructors
at Jones Aviation Flying Instructors,
Inc.

Additionally,
“Dekkers had purchased his aviation
school at just about the time the
terrorist pilots moved into town and
began their lessons,” according to an
aviation employee at Venice Airport.
Another observer at the Airport
admitted: “I’ve always had some
suspicions about the way he breezed
into town out of nowhere. Just too
many odd little things. For example,
he has absolutely no aviation
background as far as anyone can tell.
And he evidently had no use for, nor
knowledge of, FAA rules and regs.”
Special Operations Commando leader
from the nearby McDill Air Force Base
observed: “Rudi’s greedy, and when
you’re greedy you can be used for
something.”

According to law
enforcement officials, Dekkers has
also reportedly been recently indicted
in his native country, Holland, on
financial charges that may include
fraud and money laundering.

[57]
Yet despite his dubious background,
activities and connections, in
addition to his role in training most
of the terrorists responsible for 11th
September, he does not appear to have
been investigated by the FBI. Indeed,
his innocence seems to have been
presumed from the outset: “Forty-eight
hours after the Sept. 11 attack, a
flight school owner named Rudi Dekkers,
known to have trained virtually the
entire terrorist pilot cadre… seemed
impervious to suspicion.”[58]

Most intriguing in
this whole affair is the revelation of
a Venice Airport executive, as
reported by Hopsicker, that Britannia
Aviation, which operates from a hangar
at Rudi Dekker’s Huffman Aviation at
Venice Airport, had a “green light”
from the Justice Department’s Drugs
Enforcement Administration (DEA), and
that the local Venice Police
Department “had been warned to leave
them alone.” Britannia Aviation had
been awarded a five-year contract to
run a large regional maintenance
facility at the Lynchburg, Virginia,
Regional Airport. At the time of the
award, virtually nothing was known
about the company. When Britannia was
chosen over a respected and successful
Lynchburg company boasting a
multi-million dollar balance sheet and
more than 40 employees, aviation
executives there began voicing
concerns to reporters at the local
newspaper.

“… it was
discovered that Britannia Aviation is
a company with virtually no assets,
employees, or corporate history.
Moreover, the company did not even
possess the necessary FAA license to
perform the aircraft maintenance
services for which it had just been
contracted by the city of Lynchburg…
When Britannia Aviation’s financial
statements were released after
prodding by the local aviation
community, they revealed Britannia to
be a ‘company’ worth less than $750.”

It also emerged that
the company had, according to one of
its executives Paul Marten, “for some
time been successfully providing
aviation maintenance services for
Caribe Air, a Caribbean carrier,” that
Hopsicker notes is, in fact, “a
notorious CIA proprietary air carrier
which, even by the standards of a CIA
proprietary, has had a particularly
checkered past…

“Caribe Air’s
history includes ‘blemishes’ like
having its aircraft seized by federal
officials at the infamous Mena,
Arkansas, airport a decade ago, after
the company was accused by government
prosecutors of having used as many as
20 planes to ship drugs worth billions
of dollars into this country.”

Yet as already
noted, an executive at Venice Airport
informed Hopsicker that a DEA source
at the airport “reluctantly told me
that Britannia had a ‘green light’
from the DEA at the Venice airport,
whatever that means. He also said the
local Venice Police Department (which
has mounted round-the-clock patrols at
the airport since Sept.11) had been
warned to leave them alone.”

Why does Britannia—a
company reportedly with
CIA connections that is operating
illegally out of the same flight
school which trained Al-Qaeda
hijackers—have a “green light” from
the Justice Department’s DEA, and
effective immunity from local police
inquiries? Daniel Hopsicker comments
that: “The new evidence adds to
existing indications that Mohamed Atta
and his terrorist cadre’s flight
training in this country was part of a
so-far unacknowledged U.S. government
intelligence operation which had
ultimately tragic consequences for
thousands of civilians on September
11…

“Far from merely
being negligent or asleep at the
switch… the accumulating evidence
suggests the CIA was not just aware of
the thousands of Arab student pilots
who began pouring into this country
several years ago to attend flight
training, but was running the
operation for still-unexplained
reasons...

It was ‘Islamic
fundamentalist’ Osama bin laden who
cloaked his covert activities under
the cover of religious charities. Were
we now discovering that our own
government intelligence agencies used
the same ruse? What was going on here?
… [W]hy did a transparent dummy front
company like Paul Marten’s Britannia
Aviation have a ‘green light’ from the
DEA? A green light for what?”

The above accounts
certainly show that although U.S.
intelligence agencies were aware of
Al-Qaeda terrorists training in U.S.
flight schools, and had apparently
been surveilling their activities for
years, they did not attempt to
apprehend them—despite the escalating
warnings of an imminent attack by
Osama bin Laden’s operatives. This was
a consequence of a decision by the FBI
command. ABC News reported that only a
few weeks before the attacks in early
August, the FBI office in Phoenix
alerted FBI headquarters to the
unusual influx of Arab students with
Al-Qaeda connections training at local
flight schools. This warning was
ignored.

[60]
It therefore appears that Mueller had
attempted to mislead the public about
the scope of the FBI’s knowledge.

However, his
admission that such knowledge could
have empowered the U.S. to avert the
attacks, taken into account with the
fact that the FBI did indeed possess
such knowledge, brings up the
pertinent question of why the FBI
failed to do so, despite being
perfectly capable of doing so,
according to the FBI Director’s own
indirect admission. In what seems to
be an attempt to explain away the
FBI’s rather shocking inaction, while
Osama bin Laden’s terrorist lackeys
were undergoing extensive training at
U.S. military facilities, financed by
Saudi authorities as Newsweek
reports—and while innumerable credible
warnings received by the U.S.
intelligence community repeatedly
predicted air attacks on “symbols of
American culture” by bin Laden-linked
terrorists, via the hijacking of
civilian planes—the senior U.S.
government official cited above
claimed that “there was no information
to indicate the flight students had
been planning suicide hijacking
attacks.” The Post recorded him
as follows: “We were unable to marry
any information from investigations or
the intelligence community that talked
to their use of this expertise in the
events that we saw unfold on the 11th.”[61]

In this context, to
interpret the FBI’s failure to act as
mere incompetence, compounded by
bureaucracy, strains the limits of
reason. It also flies in the face of
the most elementary methods of
intelligence gathering. As
demonstrated in the preceding
documentation, there was abundant
intelligence information predicting an
imminent attack by Al-Qaeda operatives
on U.S. soil. Moreover, this
information indicated that Osama bin
Laden was orchestrating the hijacking
of civilian planes to be used as bombs
against key U.S. buildings in
Washington and New York. Reports show
that this information was “taken
seriously” by “the American
intelligence community.” Hence, U.S.
intelligence agencies were already
well aware that plans to implement
Project Bojinka were in progress—and
had accordingly intensified
surveillance in direct response.

The FBI and the
CIA had known quite specifically that
key targets of the plan were buildings
constituting “symbols of American
culture” located in Washington and New
York, including the World Trade
Centre. Furthermore, as a consequence
of surveillance, the FBI had known for
several years that suspected
terrorists with ties to bin Laden were
undergoing training at U.S. flight
schools and secure U.S. military
facilities—and in the latter case,
with high-level U.S. military
clearance, financed by the
Saudi Arabian government. Marrying
this information together, as we have
done here, clearly demonstrates that
the obvious course of action was to
apprehend, interrogate and follow up
investigations into the Al-Qaeda
operatives under surveillance,
particularly those training at U.S.
flight schools.

Yet nothing of the
sort was done. Despite being under
direct surveillance by the U.S.
intelligence community during 2000 and
2001—surveillance which intensified
after receipt of credible warnings of
an imminent Project Bojinka-style
attack by Al-Qaeda—these hijackers,
including Mohamed Atta, were allowed
to travel freely into and out of the
U.S. They were apparently granted
high-level clearance to undergo
military training at secure U.S.
facilities with Saudi government
funding as well.

The freedom with
which Al-Qaeda operatives entered and
left the U.S. should be understood in
the context of testimony from Michael
Springmann, former head of the Visa
Bureau at the U.S. Consulate in
Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, between 1987 and
1989. Springmann, has had 20 years of
experience in the U.S. government, and
is now a practising lawyer in
Washington DC. He stated on BBC’s
‘Newsnight’ that: “In Saudi Arabia I
was repeatedly ordered by high level
State Dept officials to issue visas to
unqualified applicants. These were,
essentially, people who had no ties
either to Saudi Arabia or to their own
country.”

In another interview
with CBC’s Radio One, he stated that
according to confirmation he received
from U.S. government officials, the
“CIA was recruiting terrorists to
fight against the then Soviets.” Osama
bin Laden, moreover, “was their asset,
and was working with them.” There were
“as many as a hundred” recruits,
people “with no ties to any place in
particular… Afghanistan was the end
user of their facilities. They were
coming to the U.S. for training as
terrorists. The countries that had
supplied them did not want them back.”
Springmann testified that CIA
officials had consistently violated
State Department regulations to issue
visas to these people.

“CBC: Does this
demonstrate a relationship between the
CIA and Osama Bin Laden dating back as
far as 1987?

“SPRINGMANN: That’s
right, and as you recall, they believe
that this fellow Sheikh Abdurrahman
who was tied to the first New York
World Trade Center bombing had gotten
his visa from a CIA case officer in
the Sudan. And that the 15 or so
people who came from Saudi Arabia to
participate in the attacks on the WTC
and the Pentagon had gotten visas
through the American consulate general
in Jeddah.

“CBC: So what does
that suggest, that this pipeline was
never rolled up, that it’s still
operating?

“SPRINGMANN:
Exactly. I thought that it had been,
because I’d raised sufficient hell
that I thought that they’d done it. I
had complained to the Embassy in
Riyadh, I had complained to diplomatic
security in Washington, I had
complained to the General Accounting
Office, I had complained to the State
Department Inspector-General’s Office,
I had complained to the Bureau of
Consular Affairs at the State
Department and apparently the
reverberations from this were heard
all over the State Department.

“CBC: If what you
say may be true, many of the
terrorists who allegedly flew those
planes into those targets, got their
U.S. visas through the CIA and your
U.S. consulate in Jeddah. That
suggests a relationship ongoing as
recently as obviously September. But
what was the CIA presumably recruiting
these people for as recently as
September 11th?

“SPRINGMANN: That I
don’t know. And that’s one of the
things that I tried to find out
through a series of Freedom of
Information Act requests starting ten
years ago. At the time the State
Department and the CIA stonewalled my
requests. They’re still doing so.

“CBC: If the CIA had
a relationship with the people
responsible for September 11th, are
you suggesting therein that they are
somehow complicit?

“SPRINGMANN: Yes,
either through omission or through
failure to act… By the attempts to
cover me up and shut me down, this
convinced me more and more that this
was not a pipedream, this was not
imagination...

“CBC: But when you
take the events of 87, when visas were
being issued to people unqualified for
them, it suggests that happened again
to the same people responsible for the
attacks on New York and Washington,
that’s a quantum leap. How do you
justify that?

“SPRINGMANN: For all
I know, for all we know, this may have
not been the intended consequence, it
could’ve been a mistake, it could’ve
been a misjudgement. Or for all we
know, it could’ve been an effort to
get the U.S. directly involved in some
fashion. I mean it’s only a few
thousand dead and what’s this against
the greater gain for the United States
in the Middle East?

“CBC: But you’re
quite sure that Mohamed Atta and
others had their visas issued in
Jeddah?

“SPRINGMANN: Well
this is what I was told by reading an
article in the Los Angeles Times.”

Despite Springmann’s
prolific warnings and complaints that
had alerted the State Department to
his opposition to these events, the
U.S. government responded not by
rolling up the pipeline, but by
opening it up even further. This
occurred in the face of increasing
evidence of Saudi connections to
terrorism. The St. Petersburg Times
reports that: “After the Persian Gulf
War in 1991, the visa situation became
murkier. FBI agents complained that
their Saudi counterparts hampered
investigations into terror attacks,
including a 1996 bombing on Dhahran
that killed 19 U.S. servicemen. The
Americans also suspected that the
Saudi monarchy was doing little to
root out terrorism on Saudi soil and
to stop anti-American threats…

“Yet, instead of
tightening visa requirements, the U.S.
government made it easier for
Saudi visitors to come to America.
Under a program called U.S. Visa
Express, introduced four months before
the Sept. 11 attacks, Saudis were
allowed to arrange visas through 10
travel agencies—often without coming
to the U.S. Embassy or consulate for
interviews.”

We should recall
that these preposterous measures,
which are in stark violation of the
State Department’s mandatory
regulations for the issuing of visas,
were instituted by the Bush
administration at a time when the U.S.
intelligence community was on alert
for an imminent Al-Qaeda attack. This
is not an issue of the supposed need
to tighten borders further, but of why
existing regulations were ignored and
violated. Furthermore, it is a matter
of record that U.S. intelligence was
already well aware at this time that
key figures in the Saudi establishment
supported Osama bin Laden’s terrorist
network (See Chapter VI). Indeed,
Springmann himself had warned the
State Department repeatedly that
unqualified applicants were being
issued U.S. visas by the CIA. Yet, the
U.S. government apparently allowed the
fraudulent visa arrangement to
continue, unabated.

There is good reason
to believe that the FBI’s failure to
apprehend suspected terrorists, who
were linked to bin Laden and operating
within the U.S., was the result of
high-level blocks from the FBI command
and Justice Department. Evidence for
this comes from the authoritative
testimony of U.S. attorney David
Philip Schippers, former Chief
Investigative Counsel for the U.S.
House Judiciary Committee, and head
prosecutor responsible for conducting
the impeachment against former
President Bill Clinton. His long
record of impeccable expertise and
extensive experience makes him a
highly credible source.

Two days after the
attacks, Schippers went public in an
interview with WRRK in Pittsburgh,
PA., stating that he had attempted to
warn U.S. Attorney General John
Ashcroft, along with other federal
officials, about the terrorist attacks
weeks before they occurred. He stated
that he had received information from
U.S. intelligence sources, including
FBI agents, that a massive attack was
being planned by terrorists, targeting
the financial arteries of lower
Manhattan. Schippers had attempted to
bring this information to the
attention of John Ashcroft, six weeks
before the tragedy of Black Tuesday.

[66]
Schippers went public again in October
2001, reiterating that, several months
prior to September, impeccable sources
in the U.S. intelligence community,
including agents of the U.S.
government’s law enforcement agency,
the FBI, had approached him with
information about the impending
attacks.

According to
Schippers, these agents knew, months
before the 11th September
attacks, the names of the hijackers,
the targets of their attacks, the
proposed dates, and the sources of
their funding, along with other
information. At least two weeks prior
to 11th September, the FBI
agents again confirmed that an attack
on lower Manhattan, orchestrated by
Osama bin Laden, was imminent.
However, the FBI command cut short
their investigations into the
impending terrorist attacks and those
involved, threatening the agents with
prosecution under the National
Security Act if they publicised
information pertaining to their
investigations.

The agents
subsequently sought the council of
David Schippers in order to pressure
elements in the U.S. government to
take action to prevent the attacks.
Schippers warned many Congressmen and
Senators, and also attempted to
contact U.S. Attorney General John
Ashcroft without success, managing
only to explain the situation to a
lower-ranking Justice Department
official who promised a return call
from Ashcroft the next day. The
Attorney General did not return the
call despite the gravity of the
situation. Schippers is now legally
representing one FBI agent in a suit
against the U.S. government in an
attempt to subpoena their testimony,
so that he can legally speak about the
blocked investigations on public
record. In a Talk Radio interview on
the Alex Jones Show, based in Austin,
Texas, Schippers stated:

“Have you ever
heard of Yossef Bodansky? … He is the
guy that wrote the book about Bin
Laden. He was hooked up with some
Congressional leaders in the
House—kind of an unofficial, for lack
of a better word, a strike force, a
task force on terrorism [Bodansky was
Director of the U.S. Congress’ Task
Force on Terrorism and Unconventional
Warfare (Ahmed)]. They sent out a
warning on February 19, 1995, saying
there was going to be a massive attack
by the terrorists in the heartland of
the United States and it was going to
be a federal facility. Everybody
ignored it. By the way, I have seen
that warning… I don’t have it in front
of me so I can’t go into the specifics
of it too heavily but at the same
time, there was in that warning that
there was going to be a massive attack
in Washington – it took them six years
to do it. The targets were going to be
Washington, the White House and the
Capitol Building – and that they were
going to use airliners to attack
them.”[67]

In an interview with
Geoff Metcalf on WorldNetDaily,
Schippers clarified this as follows:

“I [had]
information indicating there was going
to be a massive attack in lower
Manhattan [from FBI sources]. I
couldn’t get anybody to listen to me…
about a month-and-a-half before Sept.
11. The original thing that I
heard—and you might ask Mr. Bodansky
about that… He was one of the people
behind the warning that came out Feb.
19, 1995, and this was the [original]
warning that I saw: that there was
going to be an attack on the United
States by bin Laden’s people, that the
original target—and this is the way it
reads—the original target was supposed
to be the White House and the Capitol
building, and they were going to use
commercial airliners as bombs.”[68]

Alex Jones commented
in his interview with the former Chief
Counsel: “Now later you got it from
FBI agents in Chicago and Minnesota
that there was going to be an attack
on lower Manhattan.” David Schippers
responded by explaining how his
subsequent warnings were ignored:
“Yes—and that’s what started me
calling…

“I started calling
out there. First of all, I tried to
see if I could get a Congressman to go
to bat for me and at least bring these
people out there and listen to them. I
sent them information and nobody
cared. It was always, ‘We’ll get back
to you,’ ‘we’ll get back to you,’
‘we’ll get back to you.’ Then I
reached out and tried to get to the
Attorney General, when finally we got
an attorney general in there that I
would be willing to talk to. And,
again, I used people who were personal
friends of John Ashcroft to try to get
him. One of them called me back and
said, ‘Alright I have talked to him.
He will call you tomorrow morning.’
This was like a month before the
bombing…”[69]

The call never came.
In an interview with the Eagle Forum
of Illinois concerning the evidence of
a terrorist attack, “this time on the
financial district in south
Manhattan,” Schippers stated: “Five
weeks before the September 11 tragedy,
I did my best to get a hold of
Attorney General John Ashcroft with my
concerns. The best that I could do was
get in touch with an underling in that
office who told me that all
investigations start out at lower
levels such as his.”

[70]
The Washington DC-based public
interest law firm Judicial Watch which
investigates and prosecutes government
corruption and abuse, reported in
mid-November 2001 that it was joining
forces with Schippers to represent his
FBI Special Agent against the U.S.
Justice Department:

“… an active FBI
Special Agent filed a complaint last
week concerning FBI/Justice Department
interference in and mishandling of
terrorist investigations. The FBI
Special Agent, who wishes to remain
anonymous at this time, alleges that
he was retaliated against when he
continued to push for and pursue
certain terrorist investigations over
the objections of his FBI and Justice
Department supervisors. The FBI
Special Agent, who is represented by
Judicial Watch and David Schippers,
Esq., filed the complaint last week
with the Justice Department’s Office
of Inspector General (IG) and Office
of Professional Responsibility (OPR).

Based on the
evidence, the FBI Special Agent
believes that if certain
investigations had been allowed to run
their courses, Osama bin Laden’s
network might have been prevented from
committing the September 11, 2001
terrorist attacks which resulted in
the deaths of nearly 5,000 innocents.
Judicial Watch is requesting a full
scale, independent investigation into
its client’s concerns and seeks to
hold accountable those responsible for
preventing the full investigation of
terrorist activity here in the United
States and abroad.”[71]

David Schippers
elaborated on these matters towards
the end of February 2002 in an
interview with this author. He
confirmed that U.S. intelligence had
“established the sources of the money
flow of bin Laden” as early as 1996,
but by 1999 intelligence officers
began facing fundamental high-level
obstructions to their investigations
into these matters. Schippers is
maintaining the anonymity of his
sources to avoid undue pressure on
them from elements in government and
intelligence agencies.

The earliest warning
of attacks was issued by the U.S.
Congress’ Task Force on Terrorism and
Unconventional Warfare in February
1995, which specified in general terms
that Al-Qaeda was planning a terrorist
attack on lower Manhattan, through the
use of hijacked civilian planes as
bombs. According to Schippers, the
same individuals who issued this
authoritative warning had been working
ever since on uncovering further
information on the same threat. He
stated that the warning “had started
out just a general threat, but they
narrowed it and narrowed it, more and
more with time,” until the “same
people who came out with the first
warning” informed him in “May 2002”
that “an attack on lower Manhattan is
imminent.” Schippers elaborates that
these U.S. intelligence officers had
approached him as a result of “growing
frustration” at the higher echelons of
the intelligence community who were
refusing to take action in response to
the imminent threat to U.S. national
security.

In addition to the
several FBI agents who had spoken to
Schippers directly, other U.S.
intelligence sources told him that
“there are others all over the country
who are frustrated, and just waiting
to come out.” The frustration of these
intelligence officers, Schippers
explained, was because of the
obstructions of a “bureaucratic elite
in Washington short-stopping
information,” with the consequence
that they have granted “terrorism a
free reign in the United States.”

Schippers was also
able to confirm the specific nature of
some of the FBI investigations, which
had been cut short under high-level
orders, noting for instance that the
agents who had approached him claimed
that “they had Atta [the chief
hijacker] in their sights.” The agents
also claimed to have been aware of the
names and activities of “very strange
characters training at flight
schools,” which they had attempted to
“check out.”

Such investigations
were blocked from above, to the fury
of agents on the trail of individuals
who appear to have gone on to
perpetrate the atrocities of 11th
September—including chief hijacker
Mohammed Atta himself. There was
simply no adequate justification for
these blocks, legal or otherwise, the
agents argue, adding that the
obstructions came down for no apparent
reason. Accordingly, one of them
remarked to Schippers that “if they
had been permitted to follow through
with their investigations, 9-11 would
never have happened.”[72]

The conservative
New American magazine has also
interviewed several FBI agents who
have corroborated Schippers’
testimony. In a March 2002 report, the
magazine reported that:

“Three veteran federal law enforcement
agents confirmed to THE NEW AMERICAN
that the information provided to
Schippers was widely known within the
Bureau before September 11th. Because
these individuals face possible
personal or professional retaliation,
they agreed to speak with us on
condition of anonymity. Two of them,
however, have expressed a willingness
to testify before Congress regarding
the views they have shared with us.”

A former FBI
official with extensive
counterterrorism experience told the
magazine: “I don’t buy the idea that
we didn’t know what was coming.” He
referred to the extraordinary speed
with which the FBI had produced
detailed information on the attack and
the hijackers responsible: “Within 24
hours [of the attack] the Bureau had
about 20 people identified, and photos
were sent out to the news media.
Obviously this information was
available in the files and somebody
was sitting on it.”

Another active FBI
counter-terrorism investigator stated
that it was widely known “all over the
Bureau, how these [warnings] were
ignored by Washington... All
indications are that this information
came from some of [the FBI’s] most
experienced guys, people who have
devoted their lives to this kind of
work. But their warnings were placed
in a pile in someone’s office in
Washington... In some cases, these
field agents predicted, almost
precisely, what happened on September
11th. So we were all holding our
breath… hoping that the situation
would be remedied.”

The first former FBI
agent’s further damning comments to
the New American are
particularly worth noting:

“This is pretty
appalling. The FBI has had access to
this information since at least 1997.
We’re obviously not doing our job. I
never expected to see something like
this happen in our country, but in a
way I wasn’t shocked when it did.
There’s got to be more to this than we
can see—high-level people whose
careers are at stake, and don’t want
the truth coming out... What agenda is
someone following? Obviously, people
had to know— there had to be people
who knew this information was being
circulated. People like [Al-Qaeda
terrorists] don’t just move in and out
of the country undetected. If somebody
in D.C. is taking this information and
burying it—and it’s very easy to
control things from D.C.—then this
problem goes much, much deeper... It’s
terrible to think this, but this must
have been allowed to happen as part of
some other agenda.”

It should be noted
here that high-level blocks were also
placed on FBI and military
intelligence investigations of
possible terrorist connections related
to members of the bin Laden family and
Saudi royals. The London Guardian
has elaborated that U.S. intelligence
had faced high-level blocks in their
investigations into bin Laden
terrorist connections:

“FBI and military
intelligence officials in Washington
say they were prevented for political
reasons from carrying out full
investigations into members of the bin
Laden family in the U.S. before the
terrorist attacks of September 11…

U.S. intelligence
agencies… are complaining that their
hands were tied… They said the
restrictions became worse after the
Bush administration took over this
year. The intelligence agencies had
been told to ‘back off’ from
investigations involving other members
of the Bin Laden family, the
Saudi royals, and possible Saudi links
to the acquisition of nuclear weapons
by Pakistan. ‘There were particular
investigations that were effectively
killed.’”

The documentation
provided previously, in tandem with
David Schippers’ revelations regarding
the detailed information possessed by
U.S. intelligence on the 11th
September terrorist attacks and who
was planning them, is damning evidence
that, in spite of sufficient
information, there was deliberate
inaction, in line with high-level Bush
administration directives. Indeed,
this inference is corroborated by a
report in The Herald which
notes the FBI’s arrest of alleged Al-Qaeda
conspirator Zacarias Moussaoui “at a
Minnesota flight school in August last
year, and a July report from the
agency’s Phoenix, Arizona, office
which warned that Middle Eastern
students” who “had a connection to
Osama bin Laden” were “enrolling for
flying lessons in considerable
numbers…

“U.S. lawmakers
remain astounded that the Phoenix memo
and Moussaoui’s arrest failed to set
alarm bells ringing at FBI
headquarters, even after one agent
speculated at a high-level meeting
that Moussaoui might have been taking
lessons to enable him to crash an
aircraft into the World Trade Centre
in New York.”

We should ask, of
course, on what basis did the FBI
agent assert at this high-level
meeting the possibility that the World
Trade Centre in New York would be the
target of a hijacking suicide attack
by a suspected Al-Qaeda terrorist?
Only a few days prior to the 11th
September attacks, FBI agents in
Minnesota recorded in an official
internal FBI document that Zacarias
“might be planning on flying something
into the World Trade Center.”

In context with the
documentation discussed previously, it
is clear that the agents did not do so
randomly in an information
vacuum—indeed, this is not how
intelligence operates. On the
contrary, there was very precise
information available to the FBI and
other intelligence agencies on Al-Qaeda’s
Project Bojinka plans, specifying
targets in Manhattan, which provided
reasonable grounds to believe that the
World Trade Centre was the most
probable target of an imminent Al-Qaeda
attack. The Herald report
illustrates, however, that although
this information was widely known and
discussed in the U.S. intelligence
community—including the top
strata—further investigation and
preventive measures were blocked under
“high-level” directives.

As September neared,
multiple authoritative intelligence
warnings surfaced with increasing
intensity, warning of a terrorist
attack against the U.S. We should
recall that in response to ECHELON’s
warnings, U.S. intelligence agencies
were already on alert for evidence of
a very specific Project Bojinka-style
operation, which would target key
buildings in Washington and New York.
The White House National Coordinator
for Counterterrorism, based on
CIA confirmation, had alerted all
domestic security and intelligence
agencies of an impending Al-Qaeda
attack, to be implemented in several
weeks time, at the beginning of July.
According to Chief Investigative
Counsel David Schippers, U.S. sources
had informed him as early as May that
the intelligence community had
credible information of an imminent
attack targeting the “financial
district of lower Manhattan,” and that
intelligence officers throughout the
country were frustrated by high-level
blocks on investigations and
information. The FBI appears to have
had specific information indicating
that the World Trade Centre was thus
the most probable target. Against this
background, the multiple warnings of
an impending attack by Osama bin Laden
from a variety of credible authorities
should have increasingly reinforced
the overall intelligence confirmation
of the attacks. USA Today
reports that:

“Since
passenger-filled commercial planes
slammed into the World Trade Center
and the Pentagon 5 weeks ago, a
conventional wisdom has emerged that
the terrorist attacks were so
extraordinary that they couldn't have
been predicted...

In fact, a growing
mountain of evidence suggests that the
hijackings not only were imaginable,
they also were foreshadowed. The Bush
administration received what Secretary
of State Colin Powell describes as a
‘lot of signs’ throughout the summer
that terrorists were plotting U.S.
attacks. Among them: al-Qa’eda
mentions of an impending ‘Hiroshima’
on U.S. soil.”

The London
Telegraph reported a few days
after the 11th September
attacks that:

“Israeli
intelligence officials say that they
warned their counterparts in the
United States last month that
large-scale terrorist attacks on
highly visible targets on the American
mainland were imminent…

The Telegraph has
learnt that two senior experts with
Mossad, the Israeli military
intelligence service, were sent to
Washington in August to alert the CIA
and FBI to the existence of a cell of
as many of 200 terrorists said to be
preparing a big operation… [They]
linked the plot to Osama bin Laden.”[78]

Russian President
Vladimir Putin, a leading actor in the
new international coalition against
terrorism and a close ally of
President Bush and Prime Minister
Blair, informed interviewers on MS-NBC
that the Russian government had warned
the U.S. of imminent attacks on
airports and government buildings in
the strongest possible terms for
several weeks prior to the 11th
September attacks.[79]
These warnings were quite specific in
that they indicated the hijacking of
airplanes to be used against civilian
buildings. According to Russian press
reports, Russian intelligence had
notified the U.S. government of air
attacks against civilian buildings and
told them that 25 pilots had been
specifically trained for the suicide
missions.[80]

French intelligence
had also warned their U.S.
counterparts of an impending attack in
September. The respected French daily
Le Figaro reported that:

“According to Arab
diplomatic sources as well as French
intelligence, very specific
information was transmitted to the
CIA with respect to terrorist attacks
against American interests around the
world, including on U.S. soil. A DST
[French intelligence] report dated 7
September enumerates all the
intelligence, and specifies that the
order to attack was to come from
Afghanistan.”

According to the
London Independent, the U.S.
government “was warned repeatedly that
a devastating attack on the United
States was on its way.” The newspaper
cited an interview given by Osama bin
Laden to a London-based
Arabic-language newspaper, al-Quds
al-Arabi, in late August. At about
the same time, tighter security
measures were ordered at the World
Trade Center, for unexplained reasons.

Further confirmation
of the impending attacks came from the
occurrence of other very specific
warnings. Three days after the
terrorist attacks, U.S. Senator Dianne
Feinstein pointed out that: “Bin
Laden’s people had made statements
three weeks ago carried in the Arab
press in Great Britain that they were
preparing to carry out unprecedented
attacks in the U.S.”

In the summer of
2001, an Iranian man phoned U.S. law
enforcement and warned of an imminent
attack on the World Trade Center in
the week of 9th September.
German police confirmed the calls, but
further stated that the U.S. Secret
Service refused to reveal any further
information on the matter. The
caller’s identity has not been
disclosed.

According to MS-NBC,
in the week before 11th
September, a caller to a Cayman
Islands radio talk show gave several
warnings of an imminent attack on the
U.S. by bin Laden. The identity of the
caller has not been disclosed.

The U.S. also
received an authoritative warning from
the Egyptian President, a U.S. ally
and close friend of the Bushes, which
was based on the country’s
intelligence. The Associated Press
reported that:

“Egyptian President
Hosni Mubarak says he warned the
United States that ‘something would
happen’ 12 days before the Sept. 11
terror attacks on New York and
Washington… ‘We expected that
something was going to happen and
informed the Americans. We told them,’
Mubarak said. He did not mention a
U.S. response.”

Another
authoritative warning came from Garth
L. Nicolson, Chief Scientific Officer
and Research Professor at the
Institute for Molecular Medicine in
Huntington Beach, California. Nicolson
has been called to testify as an
expert before the U.S. Senate in
relation to Department of Defense
investigations of Gulf War chemical
and biological incidents.

“My wife, Dr. Nancy
Nicolson and I received at least three
warnings of the attack on the Pentagon
on Sept. 11, 2001. The nature of these
warnings (the specific site, date and
source) indicated to us that they were
credible. We have many contacts in the
retired intelligence community,
including Special Forces, and domestic
and foreign intelligence services.
Mostly these were individuals that we
assisted with their health problems
from the Gulf War, Vietnam or other
conflicts.

The most dramatic
source was a Head of State of a North
African country. This occurred during
a visit to Tunisia in July 2001. This
head of state was travelling under
cover and met with us at our hotel. He
warned us as to the correct date and
one of the targets, the Pentagon. We
were not given any information as to
the method or any other targets.

The information was
passed on to the Director of Policy,
DoD, the National Security Council,
the leadership in the House of
Representatives and the Inspector
General of the U.S. Army Medical
Corps, who happened to be visiting us
a month or so before Sept. 11.

To our knowledge no
action was ever taken on this
information. There has been some
mention in the press that others also
warned the U.S. Government that on
Sept. 11, 2001 there would be a
terrorist attack on U.S. soil. I do
not know if any of the information
from our sources or other sources was
ever taken seriously by the National
Security Council.”

Yet another warning
from multiple intelligence agencies
just before 11th September
put the American intelligence
community on alert. The New York
Times reported:

“One intercept [of
bin Laden’s communications] before the
Sept. 11 attack was, according to two
senior intelligence officials, the
first early warning of the assault and
it set off a scramble by American and
other intelligence agencies… That
message, which was intercepted by the
intelligence services of more than one
country, was passed on to the United
States, officials from three countries
said. ‘… we assumed it would be soon,’
a senior intelligence official said.”

On 7th
September, the U.S. State Department
issued a worldwide alert warning that
“American citizens may be the target
of a terrorist threat from extremist
groups with links to [Osama bin
Laden’s] al-Qaeda organization.”
According to ABC News, the “report
cited information gathered in May that
suggested an attack somewhere was
imminent.”

[90]
It is worth reiterating here that
Schippers was notified in the same
month by key figures in the U.S.
intelligence community, who had been
working on the Al-Qaeda threat for
years, that the attacks would target
lower Manhattan. These reports show
that U.S. intelligence agencies were
on alert for an imminent attack by bin
Laden very shortly before 11th
September. Moreover, U.S. intelligence
had privately anticipated that lower
Manhattan would be the target.

Given the previous
multiple warnings from various
intelligence agencies, compounded and
reinforced by the findings of
America’s own intelligence network, it
is clear that bin Laden’s Project
Bojinka-style plan, to which the U.S.
was alerted only a few months earlier,
was soon to be implemented. The World
Trade Center was among the known
targets of Project Bojinka.
Additionally, 11th
September was the anniversary of the
conviction of Ramzi Yousef for the
first World Trade Center bombing
several years ago.

According to
Philippine Chief Superintendent
Avelino Razon, “U.S. federal officials
were aware of Project Bojinka and… the
Philippines’ crack terrorist team was
continuing to work closely with them…
‘I remember that after the first World
Trade Center bombing Osama bin Laden
made a statement that on the second
attempt they would be successful,’
Razon stressed. He said they could
have chosen to carry out the attack on
September 11, to mark the anniversary
of Yousef’s conviction for the first
attack several years ago.”

[91]
As previously noted, Australian
analyst Paul Monk points out that 11th
September should have been a “watch
date.”

According to
Newsweek, the FBI, which as noted
previously already had many terrorists
under surveillance, were intercepting
their communications. Shortly before
11th September they wrote
comments such as: “There is a
big thing coming,” “They’re going to
pay the price,”
“We’re
ready to go.”

Just before the
attacks, U.S. intelligence received
information from Osama bin Laden
himself that something “big” would
happen on 11th September.
NBC News reported at the beginning of
October that Osama bin Laden had
phoned his mother two days before the
World Trade Center attacks and told
her: “In two days you’re going to hear
big news, and you’re not going to hear
from me for a while.” According to
NBC, a foreign intelligence service
had recorded the call and relayed the
information to U.S. intelligence.

The convergence of
these multiple warnings would have
reinforced earlier warnings, thus
clearly indicating that Project
Bojinka was to be implemented in
September, with some
information—including the admission of
bin Laden himself—specifying 11th
September in no uncertain terms. In
particular, we should remind ourselves
of the testimony of David Schippers,
which was based on information
received from FBI agents—that amid
these multiple warnings, and on the
basis of its own intensive
surveillance and intelligence
gathering operations, the FBI had
specific details of an impending air
attack on civilian buildings in lower
Manhattan in September 2001. Yet
nothing was done.

Further indication
of the extent of the American
intelligence community’s forewarning,
particularly in relation to the
specific timing of its planned
execution, can be found from analysis
of financial transactions before 11th
September. Only three trading days
before 11th September,
shares of United Airlines—the company
whose planes were hijacked in the
attacks on New York and
Washington—were massively “sold short”
by as yet unknown investors.

This was done by
buying dirt-cheap “put” options, which
give the owner a short-term right to
sell specific shares at a price well
below the current market—a long-shot
bet. When the stock prices
unexpectedly dropped even lower, in
response to the terrorist attacks, the
options multiplied a hundredfold in
value, making millions of dollars in
profit. These “short” options plays
are a sure sign of investors with
foreknowledge of an event that would
occur within a few days, and
drastically reduce the market price of
those shares. The San Francisco
Chronicle reported that:

“Investors have yet
to collect more than $2.5 million in
profits they made trading options in
the stock of United Airlines before
the Sept. 11, terrorist attacks,
according to a source familiar with
the trades and market data. The
uncollected money raises suspicions
that the investors—whose identities
and nationalities have not been made
public—had advance knowledge of the
strikes.

… October series
options for UAL Corp. were purchased
in highly unusual volumes three
trading days before the terrorist
attacks for a total outlay of $2,070;
investors bought the option contracts,
each representing 100 shares, for 90
cents each [a price of less than one
cent per share, on a total of 230,000
options]. Those options are now
selling at more than $12 each. There
are still 2,313 so-called ‘put’
options outstanding [representing
231,300 shares and a profit of $2.77
million] according to the Options
Clearinghouse Corp.

…The source
familiar with the United trades
identified Deutsche Bank Alex. Brown,
the American investment banking arm of
German giant Deutsche Bank, as the
investment bank used to purchase at
least some of these options…”[94]

But the United
Airlines case was not the only dubious
financial transaction indicating, in
the Chronicle’s words,
“advanced knowledge of the strikes.”
The Israeli Herzliyya International
Policy Institute for Counterterrorism
documented the following transactions
related to 11th September,
involving American Airlines—whose
planes were also used in the
attacks—and other companies with
offices in the Twin Towers:

“Between September
6 and 7, the Chicago Board Options
Exchange saw purchases of 4,744 put
options on United Airlines, but only
396 call options… Assuming that 4,000
of the options were bought by people
with advance knowledge of the imminent
attacks, these ‘insiders’ would have
profited by almost $5 million.

On September 10,
4,516 put options on American Airlines
were bought on the Chicago exchange,
compared to only 748 calls. Again,
there was no news at that point to
justify this imbalance;… Again,
assuming that 4,000 of these options
trades represent ‘insiders,’ they
would represent a gain of about $4
million [the above levels of put
options were more than six times
higher than normal].

No similar trading
in other airlines occurred on the
Chicago exchange in the days
immediately preceding Black Tuesday.

Morgan Stanley Dean
Witter & Co., which occupied 22 floors
of the World Trade Center, saw 2,157
of its October $45 put options bought
in the three trading days before Black
Tuesday; this compares to an average
of 27 contracts per day before
September 6. Morgan Stanley’s share
price fell from $48.90 to $42.50 in
the aftermath of the attacks. Assuming
that 2,000 of these options contracts
were bought based upon knowledge of
the approaching attacks, their
purchasers could have profited by at
least $1.2 million.

Merrill Lynch &
Co., with headquarters near the Twin
Towers, saw 12,215 October $45 put
options bought in the four trading
days before the attacks; the previous
average volume in those shares had
been 252 contracts per day [a dramatic
increase of 1200%]. When trading
resumed, Merrill’s shares fell from
$46.88 to $41.50; assuming that 11,000
option contracts were bought by
‘insiders,’ their profit would have
been about $5.5 million.

European regulators
are examining trades in Germany’s
Munich Re, Switzerland’s Swiss Re, and
AXA of France, all major reinsurers
with exposure to the Black Tuesday
disaster [AXA also owns more than 25%
of American Airlines stock].”[95]

These multiple,
massive and unprecedented financial
transactions point unequivocally to
the fact that the investors behind
these trades were speculating in
anticipation of a mid-September 2001
catastrophe that would involve both
United Airlines and American Airlines,
and offices in the Twin Towers—a clear
demonstration of their foreknowledge
or involvement in the 11th
September attacks. Ernest Welteke,
President of the German Bundesbank,
has concluded that it is certain that
a group of speculators knew the attack
was coming. According to the New
York Times, he stated: “There have
been fundamental movements in these
markets [i.e. the airlines], and the
oil price rise just ahead of the
attacks is otherwise inexplicable.”

The London Times
reports that the U.S. government has a
similar perspective: “American
authorities are investigating
unusually large numbers of shares in
airlines, insurance companies and arms
manufacturers that were sold off in
the days and weeks before the attacks.
They believe that the sales were by
people who knew about the impending
disaster.”

But as noted by U.S.
investigative journalist and former
Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD)
narcotics detective Michael C. Ruppert,
who rose to fame for uncovering the
CIA role in drug-running operations in
the 1980s, and who has been
interviewed by both the House and the
Senate for his expertise on CIA covert
operations: “It is well documented
that the CIA has long monitored such
trades—in real time—as potential
warnings of terrorist attacks and
other economic moves contrary to U.S.
interests.”[98]
The UPI also reported that the
U.S.-sponsored ECHELON intelligence
network closely monitors stock
trading.[99]

The London Times
further points out that the UK
Financial Services Authority (FSA) is
a “stock market watchdog” possessing a
“transaction monitoring department
that checks suspicious share
movements.” The FSA, however, has not
issued any informative statement on
the investigation into the share
movements before 11th
September: “The FSA would not comment
on its instructions from the CIA.”

[100]
In other words, there are both
intelligence and civilian monitoring
systems that monitor share
transactions for the express purpose
of tracking suspicious movements, and
which, therefore, would have received
warning. Elaborating, Ruppert observes
that:

“It has been
documented that the CIA, the Israeli
Mossad and many other intelligence
agencies monitor stock trading in real
time using highly advanced programs
reported to be descended from Promis
software. This is to alert national
intelligence services of just such
kinds of attacks. Promis was reported,
as recently as June, 2001 to be in
Osama bin Laden’s possession and, as a
result of recent stories by FOX, both
the FBI and the Justice Department
have confirmed its use for U.S.
intelligence gathering through at
least this summer. This would confirm
that CIA had additional advance
warning of imminent attacks.”[101]

Ruppert further
describes the CIA’s tracking of
financial transactions as follows:

“One of the primary
functions of the Central Intelligence
Agency by virtue of its long and very
close history of relationships with
Wall Street… the point where the
current executive vice president of
the New York Stock Exchange is a
retired CIA general counsel, has had a
mandate to track, monitor, all
financial markets worldwide, to look
for anomalous trades, indicative of
either economic warfare, or insider
currency trading or speculation which
might affect the U.S. Treasury, or, as
in the case of the September 11
attacks, to look for trades which
indicated foreknowledge of attacks
like we saw.

One of the vehicles
that they use to do this is a software
called Promis software, which was
developed in the 1980s, actually 1979,
by Bill Hamilton and a firm called
INSLAW, in [the] Washington D.C. area.
And Promis is very unique for two
reasons: first of all, it had the
ability to integrate a wide range of
databases using different computer
languages and to make them all into
one readable format. And secondly, in
the years since, Promis has been mated
with artificial intelligence to even
predict moves in markets and to detect
trades that are anomalous, as a result
of those projections.

So, as recently as
last year, I met with members of the
RCMP [Royal Canadian Mounted Police]
national security staff, who came down
to Los Angeles where I am, who are
investigating stolen applications of
Promis software and its applications,
and we reconfirmed at that time that,
not only the U.S., but Israel, Canada,
and many other countries use Promis-like
software to track real-time trades in
the stock markets to warn them of
these events.”

However, he
clarifies that such software is not
necessary for intelligence agencies to
note the ominous implications of the
trades going on shortly before 11th
September:

“The key evidence…
was the trades themselves, the
so-called put options and the short
selling of American Airlines, United
Airlines, Merrill Lynch, Morgan
Stanley, and a couple of reinsurance
companies in Europe, which are just
really off the maps. You wouldn’t need
software to look at these trades and
say, ‘Oh my God, this is directly
connected to the World Trade Center.’

Herzliyah,
International Policy Institute in
Israel which tracks counter-terrorism,
also tracks financial trading. That’s
a clear cut sign about how closely the
two are related. And their reports are
very clear that between September 6
and 7 the Chicago Board Options
Exchange, CBOE, saw purchases of 4,744
put options on UAL, but only 396 call
options. On September 10, the day
before the attacks, 4,516 put options
were placed on American Airlines,
against only 748 calls, calls being
bets that the stock will go up, puts
being that the stock will go down. No
similar trading in any other airlines
occurred on the Chicago Exchange in
the days immediately preceding Black
Tuesday. That means that someone had
advance knowledge that only the stocks
of these two airlines would be
adversely impacted. Had it just been
an industry-wide slump, then you would
have seen the same kind of activity on
every airline, not just these two. But
what is also very anomalous, very out
of whack here, is the fact that the
number of put options placed, that the
level of these trades was up by 1,200
percent in the three days prior to the
World Trade Center attacks.”[102]

The Wall Street
Journal reported some disturbing
developments in the investigation into
this suspicious share trading at the
beginning of October 2001. The ongoing
investigation by the Security and
Exchange Commission had by then been
joined by a U.S. Secret Service probe
into purchases of an exceptionally
large number of five-year U.S.
Treasury notes, just prior to the
attacks. Among the Treasury note
transactions was a single $5 billion
trade. The Journal points out
that:

“Five-year Treasury
notes are among the best investments
in the event of a world crisis,
especially one that hits the U.S. The
notes are prized for their safety and
their backing by the U.S. government,
and usually rally when investors flee
riskier investments, such as stocks.”

The day after the
Journal report came out, chief of
the FBI’s financial crimes unit Dennis
Lormel attempted to downplay the
significance of these trades, claiming
in testimony before a Congressional
committee that “To date there are no
flags or indicators” showing that
terrorists used strategies such as
“short selling” to profit from the 11th
September attacks.

[104]
However, FOX News cited German central
bank president Ernst Welteke, who
explained toward the end of September
that “a study by his bank strongly
points to ‘terrorism insider trading’
not only in shares of heavily affected
industries such as airlines and
insurance companies, but also in gold
and oil.”[105]
Admitting that there has been a great
deal of “speculation and rumours,”
Welteke also stated that “there are
ever clearer signs that there were
activities on international financial
markets which must have been carried
out with the necessary expert
knowledge.”[106]

[107]
Principal of Broadband Research John
Kinnucan commented: “I saw put-call
numbers higher than I’ve ever seen in
10 years of following the markets,
particularly the options markets.”[108]
As CBS 60 Minutes reported:
“Sources tell CBS News that the
afternoon before the attack, alarm
bells were sounding over unusual
trading in the U.S. stock options
market.”[109]

These trades
strongly suggest that certain
well-connected and wealthy investors
had advance knowledge of the attacks.
To date, both the Securities &
Exchange Commission (SEC) and the FBI
have been tight-lipped about their
investigation of the trades. “The SEC
and the Federal Bureau of
Investigation have said nothing about
their investigation into suspect
trades,” according to the San
Francisco Chronicle.

[110]
Indeed, the FBI appears to have taken
measures to block public knowledge of
the progress of the investigation.

The Investment
Dealers Association (IDA), a trade
association for the Canadian
securities industry, posted on its web
site an SEC list of 38 stocks. The SEC
had requested Canadian security firms
to investigate suspicious trading in
these stocks between 27 August and 11
September 2001. But as soon as U.S.
officials became aware that the full
list of stocks had been posted online,
they demanded the removal of the list
from the Investment Dealers
Association’s site. The IDA complied,
but reporters were able to copy the
list before its removal.

The list of stocks
includes the parent companies of
American, Continental, Delta,
Northwest, Southwest, United and U.S.
Airways, as well as Carnival and Royal
Caribbean cruise lines, aircraft maker
Boeing and defense contractor Lockheed
Martin. Several insurance companies
are on the list—American International
Group, Axa, Chubb, Cigna, CNA
Financial, John Hancock and MetLife.
Several giant companies that were
former tenants in the World Trade
Center were also on the list: the
largest tenant, investment firms
Morgan Stanley; Lehman Brothers; Bank
of America; and the financial firm
Marsh & McLennan. Other major
companies on the list were General
Motors, Raytheon, LTV, WR Grace, Lone
Star Technologies, American Express,
Bank of New York, Bank One, Citigroup
and Bear Stearns.

A probe of
suspicious stock trading in these
companies would attempt to isolate the
investors, or group of investors,
involved therein, thus uncovering
those who had foreknowledge of the
attacks.

Why did U.S.
officials object to publication of a
list of stocks in which suspicious
trading occurred? Moreover, why have
the results of the investigation so
far, and any progress being made, not
been made public?

Given that there are
both intelligence and civilian systems
that monitor share transactions for
the express purpose of tracking
suspicious movements, and given
further that the transactions just
prior to 11th September
were so unprecedented, massive and
specific, these systems would have
received advance warning. These
monitoring systems would also have
clearly pointed to a specified time
for the attacks as occurring between
early and mid-September. U.S.
intelligence would have been alerted
as early as 7th September
that American and United Airlines,
along with the World Trade Center,
were potential targets. The question
remains, again, as to why nothing was
done in response.

The London
Independent has noted in relation
to such events that: “To the
embarrassment of investigators, it has
also emerged that the firm used to buy
many of the ‘put’ options—where a
trader, in effect, bets on a share
price fall—on United
Airlines stock was headed until 1998
by ‘Buzzy’ Krongard, now executive
director of the CIA.”

There is, indeed,
abundant evidence discussed by Ruppert
that the relationship between Wall
Street and the CIA is akin to a
‘revolving door.’ For instance,
elaborating on the Independent’s
observations, Ruppert notes that one
of the key firms involved in the put
options for United Airlines, Deutsche
Bank Alex. Brown, was until 1998
managed by A. B. “Buzzy” Krongard.
Before then, until 1997, Krongard was
Chairman of the investment bank AB
Brown, which was acquired by Banker’s
Trust in 1997. He then became, as part
of the merger, Vice-Chairman of
Banker’s Trust-AB Brown. He joined the
CIA in 1998 as counsel to CIA Director
George Tenet, to be later promoted to
CIA Executive Director by President
Bush in March 2001. BT was acquired by
Deutsche Bank in 1999, forming the
single largest bank in Europe. Ruppert
has also documented other crucial
details relating to the
interrelationship between the CIA,
banks and the brokerage world.[114]

Long-standing links
between Western intelligence and
finance appear to have been
instrumental in the foreknowledge of
certain corporations about the
attacks. Veteran U.S. journalists
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St.
Clair reported in their respected
current affairs newsletter,
Counterpunch, that “an internal
memo was sent around Goldman Sachs in
Tokyo on September 10 advising all
employees of a possible terrorist
attack. It recommended all employees
to avoid any American government
buildings.”[115]

Indeed, there is
evidence that the threat was not
ignored, at least not in certain
selected respects. The San
Francisco Chronicle reported one
day after the attacks that Mayor
Willie Brown received a phone call
eight hours before the hijackings from
what he described as his air security
staff, warning him not to travel by
air:

“For Mayor Willie
Brown, the first signs that something
was amiss came late Monday when he got
a call from what he described as his
airport security—a full eight hours
before yesterday’s string of terrorist
attacks—advising him that Americans
should be cautious about their air
travel… Exactly where the call came
from is a bit of a mystery. The mayor
would say only that it came from ‘my
security people at the airport.’”[116]

San Francisco Mayor
Willie Brown was booked to fly from
the Bay area to New York City on the
morning of September 11.[117]
Clearly, it seems that certain
high-level U.S. security authorities
anticipated some sort of grave danger,
and believed it to be urgent,
threatening and certainly real enough
to inform a U.S. City Mayor about to
catch a flight to New York—but not the
general public.

The London Times
reported that the famous novelist,
Salman Rushdie, received a similar
warning to avoid U.S. and Canadian
airlines. According to Rushdie’s own
testimony, the warning came directly
from the U.S. Federal Aviation
Administration (FAA). The Times
reports:

“The author Salman
Rushdie believes that U.S. authorities
knew of an imminent terrorist strike
when they banned him from taking
internal flights in Canada and the
U.S. only a week before the attacks.
On September 3 the Federal Aviation
Authority made an emergency ruling to
prevent Mr Rushdie from flying.”[118]

Another news report
records that “the FAA has confirmed it
stepped up security levels relating to
Rushdie,” but “the airlines weren’t
willing to upgrade their security” in
relation to the wider public.

[119]
It is public knowledge that Rushdie is
under 24-hour protection of UK
Scotland Yard’s Special Branch, and
that all his travel plans are approved
by the MI5 for domestic travel within
the UK, and by the MI6 for
international travel. The MI5 and MI6
are the British equivalent of the
American CIA. Clearly, it appears that
British intelligence anticipated a
grave danger, under the guidance of
U.S. authorities, and believed it to
be urgent, threatening and real enough
to inform Rushdie—but once again not
the general public.

Another report
points to the Pentagon’s dubious role.
Newsweek reported that on 10th
September 2001, the day before the
attacks, “a group of top Pentagon
officials suddenly canceled travel
plans for the next morning, apparently
because of security concerns.”

[120]
An earlier report by Newsweek,
published two days after the attacks,
referred to the same event in more
detail:

“… the state of
alert had been high during the past
two weeks, and a particularly urgent
warning may have been received the
night before the attacks, causing some
top Pentagon brass to cancel a trip.
Why that same information was not
available to the 266 people who died
aboard the four hijacked commercial
aircraft may become a hot topic on the
Hill.”

Apparently, top
Pentagon officials had known not only
of an imminent threat to “security” in
relation to their “travel plans,” but
had even anticipated its exact timing
and taken measures to protect
themselves—but not the general public.
Together, these reports strongly
suggest that high levels of the U.S.
military intelligence community knew
something very significant—and took it
seriously.

It is noteworthy
that these reports also strongly
suggest foreknowledge among high-level
elements of the U.S. military
intelligence community, that attacks
would occur mid-September, and even
more specifically on the 11th
of that month. As WorldNetDaily
editor and veteran American journalist
Joseph Farah rightly observes:

“Now, you’re
probably wondering why Willie Brown
and Salman Rushdie [and senior
Pentagon officials] are more important
to the U.S. government than you and me
and Barbara Olson. I’m wondering the
same thing…

These selective
warnings—and I have no doubt there
were many more we have not yet heard
about—suggest strongly that the FBI,
CIA and other federal agencies had the
information, knew something big was
up, something that involved terrorist
attacks on airliners, but failed to
disclose the information to the
airlines and the flying public in
general. I think heads should roll at
the FBI and CIA. I think there ought
to be an investigation into what the
FAA knew and when it knew it. I think,
once again, the federal government has
neglected its main responsibility
under the Constitution—protecting the
American people from attack.”[122]

As early as 1995,
the U.S. had information relating to
the plans to launch air attacks on the
World Trade Center—information that
was repeatedly confirmed by the
American intelligence community since
then, all the way to the year 2001.
Yet these agencies neglected almost
entirely to do anything to prevent or
prepare for these attacks as far as
the general public was concerned.

[123]
Indeed, all such possible measures
were cut short. Such was the case with
the investigations by FBI agents
confirming the impending 11th
September terrorist attacks, whose
leads were severed by the FBI command
without explanation—a situation
apparently maintained with the
complicity of the Attorney General, a
Presidential appointee. The U.S.
government’s leading law enforcement
agency thus deliberately ignored its
own findings, and blocked these
findings from being publicised.

We should
particularly consider ECHELON’s
warnings of a Project Bojinka-style
attack by Al-Qaeda on U.S. soil,
targeting “symbols of American
culture,” first 6 months and then 3
months prior to September. According
to the Newsbytes division of
the Washington Post, “the
warnings” that terrorists planned to
hijack civilian airplanes and use them
as bombs “were taken seriously” by
“the American intelligence community”,
as a consequence of which
“surveillance intensified.”
Furthermore, White House
Counter-terrorism chief Richard A.
Clarke confirms that the CIA fully
anticipated an impending Al-Qaeda
attack on U.S. soil in June 2001, and
that the entire intelligence community
was alerted by the beginning of July,
just over six weeks prior to 11th
September.

Warnings indicated
that Project Bojinka would be
implemented in the next several weeks.
The World Trade Center was a confirmed
target of Project Bojinka. The
testimony of David Schippers confirms
that knowledge that the impending
attack would target key buildings in
lower Manhattan, of which the World
Trade Center is most prominent as a
terrorist target, was fairly
widespread among high-levels elements
of the U.S. intelligence community.
This seems to lead the chain of
responsibility for the failure to act
right to the top: the Director of
Central Intelligence (DCI).

The term
“intelligence community” is a specific
terminology coined by U.S.
intelligence agencies to refer to all
the 13 official government agencies
that have an “intelligence” role. The
Newsbytes report on the ECHELON
warnings, apart from noting that the
entire intelligence community was
alerted to an impending Project
Bojinka-style terrorist attack, also
indicates that surveillance, i.e.
intelligence gathering efforts, were
increased in direct response to the
ECHELON warnings. This means that U.S.
intelligence agencies had adequate
information with which to marry their
specific findings, e.g. the FBI’s
surveillance and investigations of Al-Qaeda
operatives training at U.S. flight
schools.

The official line
has been that intelligence agencies
had no reason to believe that these
people with links to bin Laden were
about to use their training to perform
a terrorist act—but the documentation
presented here shows that this is
entirely false: the intelligence
community already knew what Al-Qaeda
was planning—it was just a matter of
who and when.

Indeed, as a direct
consequence of the intensification of
surveillance, U.S. intelligence began
finding out who. And as a direct
consequence of the convergence of
urgent warnings from multiple credible
sources, including the interception of
communications by Osama bin Laden
himself, the probable date of the
attacks also grew increasingly
evident. Yet when FBI agents began
finding out who (e.g. Al-Qaeda
operatives training at U.S. military
and flight facilities), the
investigations were blocked by the FBI
command and Justice Department. When
multiple warnings together pointed
clearly to the probability of an
imminent attack by bin Laden, likely
to occur on 11th September,
these warnings were ignored.

The idea that the
failure to act was a result of the
incompetence resulting from
unintentional bureaucratic stumbling
blocks within the American
intelligence community, fails to
address the reality and nature of the
multiple warnings received by that
community. It is also based on a lack
of understanding of the nature of
intelligence gathering and the
intelligence structure in the United
States.

There are 13
official government agencies that
constitute the U.S. intelligence
community, with a huge budget of $30
billion. The Director of Central
Intelligence is charged by law with
the coordination and dissemination of
intelligence gathered from all U.S.
agencies, including the FBI.
Additionally, many FBI agents work
directly at CIA headquarters. The CIA,
in line with its mandate for central
managerial oversight of the U.S.
intelligence community, produces
‘strategic level’ intelligence
assessments for the U.S. government,
drawing upon all available
intelligence sources. A discussion
follows of the nature and purpose of
CIA strategic level intelligence
assessments, regularly presented to
leading members of the White House
Cabinet.

There is also a
State Department Working Group set up
to accomplish the same task in which
the CIA participates.

[125]
A body of experts known as the
Counterterrorism Security Group (CSG)
exists, which was effectively chaired
by White House Counterterrorism chief
Richard Clarke. The CSG constitutes a
connecting point for all federal
agencies, whose members are “drawn
mainly from the C.I.A., the National
Security Council, and the upper tiers
of the Defense Department, the Justice
Department, and the State Department,”
and who meet “every week in the White
House Situation Room.” The CSG
assesses all reliable intelligence
related to counterterrorism received
by these agencies and departments.[126]

The regular
intelligence assessments produced by
the CIA for the top decision-makers of
the U.S. government, which draw on all
available intelligence sources, are
known as ‘strategic level’
assessments. ‘Strategic level’ refers
to the highest level of
decision-making—at the national or
alliance level. For example, during
the Second World War, when Churchill
and Roosevelt met to discuss their
long-range plans, they were
considering strategiclevel
issues. ‘Strategic
intelligence’ is thus designed to
answer the category of questions that
arise at the level of strategic
decision-making: e.g. is country X
about to turn hostile? If so, what
would be their overall capability
to attack?

The threat of a
large-scale terrorist attack
orchestrated by operatives located in
a particular country (in this case
Afghanistan), and harboured/supported
by the ruling regime of that country
(in this case the Taliban), would
certainly come under this “strategic”
category. Such a threat, and its
various dimensions and implications,
should therefore have been passed
directly to members of the White House
Cabinet, including President Bush
himself. According to established
procedures by which the CIA keeps U.S.
decision-makers informed, President
Bush and other key members of his
Cabinet would have received CIA
intelligence assessments on the
imminent Al-Qaeda operation.

[128]
This seems to lend significant weight
to the conclusion that the CIA, the
DCI, the State Department, the
President, and key figures around him
in the White House, were ultimately
responsible for doing nothing
in the face of the mounting evidence
of an impending threat to U.S.
national security.

Furthermore, since
the ECHELON warnings were “taken
seriously,” this means that the U.S.
intelligence community should have
been on alert and anticipating a
Project Bojinka-style attack. The DCI
would consequently have been doing its
best to evaluate and coordinate
information coming in from all sources
to prevent the attack. Given that the
U.S. intelligence community
anticipated a Project Bojinka-style
attack by Al-Qaeda operatives on U.S.
soil, and had consequently intensified
surveillance, all credible information
and warnings that were subsequently
collected were reviewed against this
backdrop, with the specific intention
of gathering further intelligence on
bin Laden’s plans. This subsequent
data, therefore, would have been
understood in context with the plans
of which the U.S. intelligence
community had already become aware—six
months and then three months prior to
11th September.

Thus, from both a
statutory and an organisational
standpoint, the argument of
incompetence or bureaucratic blocking
is extremely weak. Even to argue that
elements of the Bush administration
had significant knowledge of what
would happen, but not enough detail to
take measures to prevent the attacks,
is based on a very shallow appraisal
of the nature and number of
intelligence warnings received. As
evidenced on public records, these
warnings were not only extremely
detailed, but also extremely specific
as to probable perpetrators, methods,
targets, and dates.

[129]
As the Intelligence Note Book
of the Canadian Forces Intelligence
Branch Association clarifies in
relation to methods of intelligence
gathering:

“… one always wants
to have as many different sources as
possible confirming one’s intelligence
assessment. When many different
sources are combined in this way to
produce one final assessment, this is
known as ‘fused,’ ‘multi-source’ or
even ‘all-source’ intelligence.
Really, the sources used are a
technicality, of more concern to the
intelligence personnel producing the
assessment than to the end-user. The
end-users’ primary interest in the
sources used will simply be to reflect
how certain the conclusions are. The
more different sources there are
indicating a conclusion, the more
certain we can be about that
conclusion.”

Indeed, the numerous
warnings received and intercepted by
the U.S. intelligence community in
regard to 11th September
certainly met the four established
criteria of what constitutes an
intelligence success in strategic
warning. Robert K. Betts, Professor of
Political Science and Director of the
Institute of War and Peace Studies at
Columbia University, and Director of
National Security Studies at the
Council on Foreign Relations,

Hence, there cannot
be any excuse within the U.S.
intelligence community for ignoring or
blocking further leads and subsequent
warnings. When the ECHELON warnings
were followed by warning after warning
to the U.S. intelligence community
from Israel, Russia, France, Egypt,
along with numerous leads and warnings
within the U.S. itself, according to
the established procedures of
intelligence gathering, the
intelligence community should have
grown increasingly certain of what was
about to occur, by whom, and when.
This is particularly clear given that
the ECHELON warnings were taken
seriously by the U.S. intelligence
community—thus providing the backdrop
of credibility against which
subsequent reliable warnings could be
assessed. Yet, we find that the very
opposite happened.

Either pertinent
CIA intelligence assessments were not
passed on to the Cabinet, in violation
of mandatory standard procedures, or
they were, and the warnings were
deliberately ignored by the nation’s
top decision-makers. The former
scenario is implausible, simply
because it is contrary to established
procedures. The CIA produces strategic
level intelligence assessments,
drawing on all sources in the U.S.
intelligence community, which are
presented to the President and other
top decision-makers. These assessments
are directly concerned with issues of
national security. It is therefore
reasonable to believe that the
escalating threat to national security
posed by Al-Qaeda was, in accordance
with routine mandatory procedures,
passed on to the President and select
members of his Cabinet.

The only other
alternative is that the procedures
were violated. But, there is no good
reason to believe this. If we
arbitrarily conjecture that procedure
was not followed, and the threat was
not passed on to top-decision makers,
then one would have to instead
conclude that responsibility rests
with significant high-level elements
of the U.S. military intelligence
community, who would bear
responsibility for keeping top U.S.
decision-makers in the dark. The
question would then remain: why and
for what purpose, if any, did they do
so?

Arguably, there is
no good reason to accept that this
scenario is plausible. On the
contrary, there is good reason to
accept the probability that,
considering their dire gravity,
warnings on the impending Al-Qaeda
operation did reach the top. According
to mandatory procedures, the imminent
threat to U.S. national security posed
by Al-Qaeda should have been passed on
to top decision-makers through
CIA intelligence assessments.

If established
procedures were followed, as they
should have been, and top
decision-makers were informed, then
the blame lies not only at the highest
levels of the DCI, CIA, FBI, the
Justice Department, the National
Security Agency, and the State
Department, but also with the White
House Cabinet. According to these
procedures, the relevant members of
the Cabinet would have received
notification of the warnings and
subsequent developments in accordance
with the CIA’s ‘strategic level’
assessment of the Al-Qaeda threat, as
well as related relays of intelligence
warnings. This is a more reasonable
hypothesis, simply because it is in
accordance with the known rules of
intelligence warning in relation to
issues of U.S. national security.

In the opinion of
this author, therefore, the data
provided here weighs strongly in
favour of the conclusion that
significant elements of the Bush
administration did indeed receive
advance warning of the attacks, but
refused to act in the interests of the
general public by pursuing measures to
prevent the attacks.

Even at the minimal
possible level of responsibility on
the part of the Bush administration,
the evidence on record strongly
suggests that the U.S. government had
enough advance warning to be at least
certain of terrorist attacks on U.S.
soil through the hijacking of civilian
planes—but despite this, failed to
institute even the most minimal of
preventive measures.

For instance, the
attacks could have been blocked even
if the government had ensured that
recommended security measures and
precautions were pursued by the
Federal Aviation Administration at
airports, on planes, and so on. Yet
the U.S. government, despite
longstanding knowledge of the threat
of impending suicide attacks from the
air—a threat that was about to become
a reality in 2001, according to highly
credible intelligence warnings—did
nothing of the sort.

Indeed, the facts on
record are sufficient to provide
reasonable grounds to believe that the
‘intelligence failure’ was in fact not
a failure at all, but a directive—or
rather, the inevitable culmination of
carefully imposed high-level
directives and blocks that restrained
agencies from acting on the very clear
intelligence received. Of course, a
full-blown inquiry into the causes of
the ‘intelligence failure’ that
allowed the 11th September
attacks to occur is essential to
determine what U.S. government,
military and intelligence agencies
knew, when they knew it, and why they
failed to act. Outside of such an
inquiry, it is impossible to
conclusively determine the exact
degree of advance warning received by
particular U.S. government, military
and intelligence agencies.

Ongoing attempts by
the Bush administration to actively
block such an inquiry into the causes
of the so-called 9-11 ‘intelligence
failure,’ however, only serve to
further support the conclusion just
outlined. CNN reported at the end of
January 2002 that:

The request was
made at a private meeting with
congressional leaders Tuesday morning.
Sources said Bush initiated the
conversation… He asked that only the
House and Senate intelligence
committees look into the potential
breakdowns among federal agencies that
could have allowed the terrorist
attacks to occur, rather than a
broader inquiry that some lawmakers
have proposed, the sources said.
Tuesday’s discussion followed a rare
call to Daschle from Vice President
Dick Cheney last Friday to make the
same request… Some Democrats, such as
Sens. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut
and Robert Torricelli of New Jersey,
have been calling for a broad inquiry
looking at various federal government
agencies beyond the intelligence
community.”

The pretext for the
administration’s proposals, according
to Daschle, is that “resources and
personnel” would be taken “away from
the war on terrorism,” in the event of
a wider inquiry that is not limited to
the assumption that the
administration’s inaction was solely a
consequence of “breakdowns among
federal agencies.”

Paradoxically, the
Bush administration thus justified
blocking a wider inquiry into the
intelligence failure that allowed the
11th September attacks to
occur, by the need to support the
administration’s attempts to counter
terrorism. In other words, the
administration suppressed an inquiry
into the greatest terror attack in
U.S. history—in the name of fighting
terrorism.

It is unfortunate
that CNN chose not to point out that
an integral dimension of any
meaningful counterterrorist programme
is the gathering of intelligence with
the view to avoiding a terrorist
attack—which is exactly what Bush’s
proposals will help prevent. Not only
is it clear that the Bush
administration was not serious about
averting terrorism prior to 11th
September, it also appears that the
administration has maintained the same
attitude—despite the obvious
consequences.

The documentation
collated here demonstrates beyond
doubt that innocent American civilians
paid with their lives because
high-level elements of the Bush
administration engineered blocks on
U.S. intelligence agencies in order to
fulfil and protect another agenda.
Unless a full-blown independent
inquiry into this process is mounted
soon, there is little doubt that more
innocent Americans will pay with their
lives again.

[14]Washington
Post, 24 September 2001. The
Post also discusses Project
Bojinka and the plans to hurl
civilian jets into key U.S.
buildings, including the WTC. Also
see Ressa, Maria, ‘U.S. warned in
1995 of plot to hijack planes,
attack buildings,’ CNN, 18 September
2001.

[16] Cited in Grigg,
William Norman, ‘Could We Have
Prevented the Attacks?’, The New
American, 5 November 2001, Vol.
17, No. 23.

[17] Grigg, William
Norman, ‘Could We Have Prevented the
Attacks?’, op. cit.

[18] Stafford, Ned,
‘Newspaper: Echelon Gave Authorities
Warning of Attacks,’ Newsbytes,
13 September 2001, www.newsbytes.com/news/01/170072.html.
ECHELON is a vast intelligence
information collection system
capable of monitoring all the
electronic communications in the
world. It is operated by the U.S.,
UK, Canada, Australia and New
Zealand. While no government agency
has ever confirmed or denied its
existence, an EU committee that
investigated ECHELON for more than a
year confirmed that the system does
exist in early September 2001. The
EU committee reported that Echelon
sucks up electronic transmissions
“like a vacuum cleaner”, using
keyword search techniques to sift
through enormous amounts of data.
The system covers the whole world’s
electronic communications with 120
satellites. For more on ECHELON see
Bamford, James, Body of Secrets:
Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National
Security Agency, Doubleday,
2001.

[19] Wright, Lawrence,
‘The Counter-Terrorist,’ New
Yorker, 14 January 2002. Under
pressure from Congress, the White
House has finally officially
admitted that the U.S. intelligence
community had information that Al-Qaeda
was planning an imminent attack
through hijacking. However, National
Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice
has gone on record denying that U.S.
intelligence had any other specific
information, such as that the planes
might be used as missiles (BBC
Newsnight, 16 May 2002). This
denial, however, is patently false,
as demonstrated by the reports on
the public record discussed here.

[21] United Press
International (UPI), 13 February
2001. This report provides empirical
information disproving an earlier
WorldNetDaily report alleging
that the Clinton administration sold
powerful encryption software to Al-Qaeda
that would allow the network to
encrypt, and thus block U.S.
surveillance of, the network’s
encrypted communications. This
report shows that regardless of
Osama bin Laden’s attempts at
encryption, the codes were broken by
ECHELON and his communications
monitored.

[23] Associated Press,
‘World Trade Center collapses in
terrorist attack,’ 11 September
2001. In an interview with ABC News
the same day, Hatch elaborated that
both CIA and FBI officials had
informed him of the same. In
response, U.S. Defense Secretary
Donald Rumsfeld denounced the report
as an unauthorised release of
classified information. The White
House later cited the leak as good
reason to withhold information
concerning U.S. counterterrorist
actions from Congress.

[65] David P. Schippers
served as Chief Counsel to the
United States House of
Representatives managers for the
impeachment trial of President Bill
Clinton in the U.S. Senate from 1st
Jan. to 28th Feb. 1999.
He served as Chief Investigative
Counsel for the United States House
of Representatives’ Committee on the
Judiciary during 1998. From April to
September he handled the
investigative issues and
investigations relating to the
committee’s oversight investigation
of the U.S. Dept. of Justice and all
of its sub-agencies. From Sept. to
Dec. 1998, he was charged with
reviewing and reporting on the
Referral of the Office of
Independent Counsel concerning
possible impeachment offenses
committed by President Clinton. He
was then responsible for conducting
the impeachment inquiry authorised
by the House of Representatives and
reporting the results to the
Committee on the Judiciary. An
attorney in private practice since
1967, Schippers is the senior
partner in the Chicago law firm,
Schippers & Bailey, which
specialises in trust law, labour
law, trials and appeals in the state
and federal courts of Illinois and
throughout the country. From 1963 to
1967, Schippers served as a member
and later the chief of the Organised
Crime and Racketeering Section of
the U.S. Department of Justice at
Chicago. He prepared and tried many
major criminal cases in the federal
courts and was also involved in a
great number of major grand jury
investigations. He previously served
in the U.S. Attorney’s Office as an
assistant United States attorney,
trying major criminal cases on
behalf of the government and
preparing and arguing appeals on
behalf of the government. Schippers
earned both his undergraduate and
J.D. degree from Loyola University
in Chicago. He has served as a
teacher of trial advocacy and
advanced trial advocacy to senior
law students at the Loyola
University School of Law. He has
also taught trial advocacy at the
Williamette University School of Law
in Salem, Oregon., and at the United
States Air Force Air University in
Montgomery, Alabama. Schippers
served as one of five members of the
Illinois State Police Merit Board
from 1987 to 1993. He is the
recipient of the Loyola University
Law Alumni Medal of Excellence, the
Loyola University Alumni Association
citation for distinguished service
to the legal profession and the
Award of Appreciation from the
Federal Criminal Investigators
Association.

[78] Wastell, David
and Jacobson, Philip, ‘Israeli
security issued warning to CIA of
large-scale terror attacks,’ The
Telegraph, 16 September 2001. It
has been claimed that the U.S.
intelligence community receives
numerous warnings such as this which
are red-herrings, thus explaining
why the latest warning from Israeli
intelligence was not taken
seriously. This argument fails,
however, in light of the fact that
the U.S. already knew for certain
that Osama Bin Laden was planning to
implement Project Bojinka very soon.
Given this knowledge, the urgent
warnings from other intelligence
agencies, including Israel, would
have obviously provided increasing
confirmation of the plans, not
disconfirmation. If not, then one
wonders what other sort of criteria
would be necessary for U.S.
intelligence to take a warning from
Mossad seriously!

[80] Russian press
reports translated by a former CIA
official, cited in Ruppert, Michael
C., ‘This Was Not An Intelligence
Failure,’ From The Wilderness
Publications, 24 September 2001.See Izvestia,
12 September 2002.

[87] Nicolson was
formally the David Bruton Jr. Chair
in Cancer Research and Professor at
the University of Texas M. D.
Anderson Cancer Center in Houston,
and Professor of Internal Medicine
and Professor of Pathology and
Laboratory Medicine at the
University of Texas Medical School
at Houston. He was also Adjunct
Professor of Comparative Medicine at
Texas A & M University. Among the
most cited scientists in the world,
having published over 480 medical
and scientific papers, edited 13
books, served on the Editorial
Boards of 12 medical and scientific
journals and currently serving as
Editor of two (Clinical &
Experimental Metastasis and the
Journal of Cellular Biochemistry),
Professor Nicolson has active
peer-reviewed research grants from
the U.S. Army, National Cancer
Institute, National Institutes of
Health, American Cancer Society and
the National Foundation for Cancer
Research. In 1998 he received the
Stephen Paget Award from the Cancer
Metastasis Research Society and the
Albert Schweitzer Award in Lisbon,
Portugal.

[88] Statement by
Professor Garth L. Nicolson to the
Institute for Policy Research &
Development, 3 January 2002.

[89] Bonner, Raymond and
Tagliabue, John, ‘Eavesdropping,
U.S. Allies See New Terror Attack,’
New York Times, 21 October
2001.

[96] Eichenwald, Kurt, et
al, ‘Doubt Intensifies That Advance
Knowledge of Attacks Was Used for
Profit,’ New York Times, 28
September 2001.

[97] Doran, James,
‘Millions of shares sold before
disaster,’ The Times, 18
September 2001.

[98] Ruppert, Michael
C., ‘Suppressed Details of Criminal
Insider Trading Lead Directly into
the CIA’s Highest Ranks,’ op. cit.
The CIA has also confirmed its use
of Promis software outside the
United States, while not denying its
monitoring of stock option trading
activity from abroad.
For further discussion see Flocco,
Tom, ‘Profits of Death—Insider
Trading and 9-11,’ FTW Publications,
6 December 2001: “In a returned
phone call from the Central
Intelligence Agency, press spokesman
Tom Crispell denied that the CIA was
monitoring ‘real-time,’
pre-September 11, stock option
trading activity within
United States borders using such
software as the Prosecutor‘s
Management Information System (PROMIS). ‘That
would be illegal. We only operate
outside the United States,’ the
intelligence official said…”
[emphasis added]

[114] Ruppert,
Michael C., ‘Suppressed Details of
Criminal Insider Trading Lead
Directly into the CIA’s Highest
Ranks,’ From The Wilderness (FTW)
Publications, 9 October 2001,
http://copvcia.com . The discussion
in this paper on financial
transactions leading up to 11th
September is based on Ruppert’s
analysis. His comments on the
CIA-Wall Street alliance are
crucial, and have been reproduced
here: “Clark Clifford – The
National Security Act of 1947 was
written by Clark Clifford, a
Democratic Party powerhouse, former
Secretary of Defense, and one-time
advisor to President Harry Truman.
In the 1980s, as Chairman of First
American Bancshares, Clifford was
instrumental in getting the corrupt
CIA drug bank BCCI a license to
operate on American shores. His
profession: Wall Street lawyer and
banker. John Foster and Allen
Dulles – These two brothers
‘designed’ the CIA for Clifford.
Both were active in intelligence
operations during WW II. Allen
Dulles was the U.S. Ambassador to
Switzerland where he met frequently
with Nazi leaders and looked after
U.S. investments in Germany. John
Foster went on to become Secretary
of State under Dwight Eisenhower and
Allen went on to serve as CIA
Director under Eisenhower and was
later fired by JFK. Their
professions: partners in the most
powerful – to this day – Wall Street
law firm of Sullivan, Cromwell.
Bill Casey – Ronald Reagan’s CIA
Director and OSS veteran who served
as chief wrangler during the
Iran-Contra years was, under
President Richard Nixon, Chairman of
the Securities and Exchange
Commission. His profession: Wall
Street lawyer and stockbroker.
David Doherty – The current Vice
President of the New York Stock
Exchange for enforcement is the
retired General Counsel of the
Central Intelligence Agency.
George Herbert Walker Bush –
President from 1989 to January 1993,
also served as CIA Director for 13
months from 1976-7. He is now a paid
consultant to the Carlyle Group, the
11th largest defense
contractor in the nation, which also
shares joint investments with the
bin Laden family. A.B. ‘Buzzy’
Krongard – The current Executive
Director of the Central Intelligence
Agency is the former Chairman of the
investment bank A.B. Brown and
former Vice Chairman of Banker’s
Trust. John Deutch – This
retired CIA Director from the
Clinton Administration currently
sits on the board at Citigroup, the
nation’s second largest bank, which
has been repeatedly and overtly
involved in the documented
laundering of drug money. This
includes Citigroup’s 2001 purchase
of a Mexican bank known to launder
drug money, Banamex. Nora Slatkin
– This retired CIA Executive
Director also sits on Citibank’s
board. Maurice ‘Hank’ Greenberg
– The CEO of AIG insurance, manager
of the third largest capital
investment pool in the world, was
floated as a possible CIA Director
in 1995. FTW exposed Greenberg’s and
AIG’s long connection to CIA drug
trafficking and covert operations in
a two-part series that was
interrupted just prior to the
attacks of September 11. AIG’s stock
has bounced back remarkably well
since the attacks. To read that
story, please go to www.copvcia.com/stories/july_2001/
part_2.html.”

[129] Ibid. Any attempt
to claim that intelligence received
by the U.S. intelligence community
was not sufficient must therefore
somehow show that the facts on
record, as documented here, are not
facts at all.

[133] The implausibility
of the idea that the CIA failed to
pass on the warnings to President
Bush Jr. and other top-decision
makers in the White House through
its regular strategic intelligence
assessments, is further clear from
the President’s strong links to the
U.S. intelligence community through
his father, former President Bush
Sr., who was Director of the CIA.
Indeed, the degree to which the
current Bush Cabinet is drawn
directly from the interlocking U.S.
military, intelligence and corporate
community, further demonstrates the
implausibility of this scenario.

[134] CNN, ‘Bush asks
Daschle to limit Sept. 11 probes,’
29 January 2002. Also see Fineman,
Howard, ‘The Battle Back Home,’
Newsweek, 4 February 2002.
Fineman reports that Cheney called
on Daschle “to pre-emptively protest
public hearings by other
committees.”